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Boys and Girls of Pioneer Days 



The Sioux Scout, whose head feather the hoy had seen, would never 
attack a cattle train again (Page 189) 



















BOYS AND GIRLS OF 
PIONEER DAYS 

From 

WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN 


By 


CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY 

Author of 


“What To Do For Uncle Sam,” “Boys and Girls of Colonial Days,” 
and other stories 


1924 

A. FLANAGAN COMPANY 

CHICAGO 


COPYRIGHT, 


^ 112 


1924, BY A. 


FLANAGAN COMPANY 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


■ N0V13?4 

©CIA 807824 




Foreword 


Every boy or girl who studies American history wants 
to grow up into the man or woman who makes history. 
But this is a hard thing to do, because your books of 
history have space for only the deeds of the gallant 
grown-ups. There is little between their covers which 
touches your life of today. 

Every important person of our country’s progress 
was once only your age. I have studied old papers from 
older attics and desks, some yellowed letters which have 
the same dates as the dates covering the most vital 
epochs of Our history, and the unpublished records of 
the friends and neighbors of our heroes. Hidden in 
these, I have found for you the boy-and-girl stories of 
some people whom you know very well through your 
school histories, but about whose childhood the histories 
say little, and about their relation to boys and girls of 
their times nothing at all. 

I found surprising things in all these records. They 
show that the people who made America great began 
being great when they were young. They started their 
greatness in the very same way any boy or girl starts, 
by doing their best in any situation in which life put 
them. So when a crisis in their grown-up life came, 
they were ready. 

Here, then, is the book of untold history stories for 


you about that period when we were a young nation try¬ 
ing hard to stand alone. There is something for you, 
also, in the stories of George Washington, Gouverneur 
Morris, Eli Whitney, Thomas Blanchard, Isaac Hull, 
Tom Creesy, Benny Goodyear, Lucy Jencks, Marshall 
Jewell, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher, Abra¬ 
ham Lincoln, ^‘Buffalo BilL’ and the rest. Can you find 
this help and so read the book that you will be able to 
make history yourselves! 


Carolyn Sherw'in Bailey. 


CONTENTS 


BOY WHO GUARDED WASHINGTON, THE. 9 

The end of the Revolution 

VISITING AT MOUNT VERNON. 17 

George Washing ton, Farmer 

PENNY OF A PATROON, THE. 26 

The story of our money system 

ELPS MAGIC FINGERS. 37 

The cotton gin unites the North and the South 

APPLE-PARING TOM . 47 

The lathe increases manufacturing 

SHIP THAT SANG, THE. 57 

The war of 1812 

ADVENTURE OF THE CHINESE COACH, THE. 68 

The era of the clipper ship in our commerce 

COVERED WAGON, THE. 79 

A nation on wheels for inland commerce 

GHOST OF BLACK HORSE INN, THE. 92 

Hospitality along old roads 

BOY WHO WANTED AN ADVENTURE, THE. 103 

Our neighbor, Europe 

LEATHER STOCKING BOY, THE. 113 

American literature begins 

BOY LIFE IN A MASSACHUSETTS TOWN. 124 

Farm life in the sixties 

WHEN THE GINGERBREAD MAN WENT TO SCHOOL.... 135 
American boarding schools open 

IN A BOY’S TOWN. 146 

Community life in the sixties 

BOY WHO LOOKED SOUTH, THE. 158 

In the cotton kingdom 

BOY WHO KNEW LINCOLN, THE. 168 

Dark days 

YOUNGEST COWBOY, THE. 180 

Out West I 


















Acknowledgments 


Boy Life in a Massachusetts Town, by Granville 
Stanley Barker, late president of Clark University, Wor¬ 
cester, Massachnsetts, is used by permission of The 
American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, for which 
society it was written. 

In a Boy^s Town, by William Dean Howells, from his 
book of that title, is used here through the courtesy and 
permission of the son and daughter of Mr. Howells. 



OKc Gbuat’de^ 



Levi and Asa Holden 
lived in Sndbnry, in 
Massachusetts, before 
the war of the revolu¬ 
tion, but they had heard 
of old fights and of the 
courage of their ances¬ 
tors. 


On the shelf above 
their fireplace stood an 
ancient silver tankard, a 


contrast to the humble pewter and blue-and-white cups 
that flanked it. Graven on this silver tankard was an 
ermine and a design of three pears in a cluster. This 
was the crest of the Holden family, and a reminder to the 
two boys of the battle in King Philip’s war during which 
Grandfather Holden had held a road against the red men 
at the risk of his own life. 

Asa was fourteen, and Levi a little older, when one 
morning there was a cloud of dust in the country road 
that lay in front of their farm and a horseman dashed by 
calling at each door: 

‘'The Redcoats have come! The British are on their 
way to Lexington! Take arms for the defense of the 
Colonies V’ 

So the farmers from miles around responded with the 
valor that makes history, and they marched toward Lex- 







10 


EOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


ington and the bridge with their flintlock muskets. No 
boy or girl needs to be told how they held the bridge, how 
they went on to make their own history at Bunker Hill. 
But there is a part of the Battle of Lexington which is 
untold. 

When the smoke cleared away, and the sun shining on 
the weary farmers of Lexington showed them the Bed- 
coats in retreat, two boys crawled from behind a hayrick 
and began cleaning their muskets. Everyone stared in 
amazement at them. The Holden boys could shoot squir¬ 
rels and an occasional deer, but no one knew that they had 
been with the volunteer regiment of farmers that had just 
saved the day for Colonial liberty. 

But there they were, Asa and Levi Holden, two New 
England boys who had taken a part—and a brave part at 
that—in the memorable fight. 

‘H’m going on to Boston!’’ Levi told his brother. 
‘H’m going to say I am twenty. I look it, being so 
tall, and perhaps I can get a commission in the army. 
I want to be the Holden of my generation who held a 
road. But you musn’t come, Asa. You’re only four¬ 
teen and you had best go home.” 

‘‘All right, Levi,” Asa said, but almost too readily 
Levi thought. The farmer troops went on to Boston 
and so did Levi. Levi marched bravely with them, like 
the true Minute Man he was trying to be. There are 
old family papers telling how he acted as a lieutenant 
at the battle of Bunker Hill, leading a division of youths 
in their teens, as he still was. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


11 


And when Levi Holden was in the thick of the fight, 
who should he find behind the hay-walled heights of 
Bunker Hill but his brother Asa! Asa had trailed along 
at the end of the line, and Levi had the chance of saving 
his younger brother's life before the end of the affair. 

After that, though, Asa had to go home. But Levi 
had so distinguished himself that he heard rumors among 
the officers of the Continental troops in regard to his 
promotion. The great General Washington, who was 
being talked about as one of the coming men of the times, 
was stationed to the south in New Jersey. Levi was 
ordered to march south with a division, toward the com¬ 
mander of the army, and he had' a high hope that he 
was going to be promoted. 

Those first years of the revolution were full of un¬ 
speakable hardships. There were no good roads, no 
trains, no food, no proper clothing. Levies shoes wore 
out before he reached 
Morristown, where 
General Washington 
was in headquarters, 
and his feet were torn 
and sore. There had 
been many encounters 
on the way, but through 
it all his heart was 
beating high with his 
hope. Perhaps the com¬ 
mander would give him 



Everyone stared in amazement 





12 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


a horse. Surely he would at least be given a new ^ 
sword! ^ 

So the ragged warriors came at last to Morristown, E 
where the staff was quartered in tents and in log cabins. 
Lady Washington was there, her spinning wheel whir- \ 
ring industriously in the midst of the turmoil. And the i 
great day came when young Levi Holden was called upon 
to stand before General Washington and receive his or¬ 
ders for the coming campaign. 

Levies courage shone out of his honest, brown eyes. 

His eagerness must have made the great commander a i 
little sorry because of the duty which he had decided to ' 
assign to him. 

^‘It is probable,’’ Washington told Levi Holden, the 
boy who had carried a musket at Lexington and at Bun¬ 
ker Hill, ‘Hhat during the course of the campaign my 
baggage, papers, and other matters of importance will 
have to be entrusted to someone. I am considering ap¬ 
pointing you as lieutenant of my life guards, Holden. 
What say you to it ? ” 

Levi gasped. That meant waiting on table, ordering 
the cook, keeping accounts, never getting into the thick 
of the fighting, but always being on guard at the doors 
and windows of staff headquarters. He had longed to 
feel a horse under him, to have the chance of waving a 
saber in the face of the enemy. 

But as the boy considered, another thought came to 
him. In addition to General Washington’s papers and 
baggage, of which he had just spoken, there was the un- 



BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 13 

spoken trust of snch a position as a lieutenant of the life 
guards, the trust of the commander ^s life. And Levi re¬ 
membered also a passage from the Bible that he and Asa 
had been obliged to learn: 

‘ ‘ They also serve who only stand and wait. ’ ’ 

‘‘Thank you, General, for the appointment,’’ Levi told 
Washington. “I will try to serve you and the statf 
well. ’ ’ 

So Levi Holden did “kitchen police” work, as we 
would speak of it today, with all his soldierly might. 
How well the boy did ity is told in one of the letters that 
General Washington wrote, and which has a bit of humor 
in it. He knew the trouble Levi had in helping him to 
give a dinner party in the mess tent. He knew, when 
Levi took his place at the 
general’s chair to pass 
the dishes, that there had 
been a struggle in the 
kitchen to keep up ap¬ 
pearances of hospitality, 

“I have asked some 
ladies to dinner,” Wash¬ 
ington wrote, “but am I 
not in honor bound to 
apprise them of their 
fare? It is needless to 
premise that our table is 
large enough to hold the 
company. To say how it 



*‘Thank you, General, for the 
appointment’* 



14 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 



Came in their ruffles and laces 


is usually covered is more essential, and this shall be the 
purport of my letter. 

‘‘Since our arrival at this happy spot we have had a 
ham, sometimes a shoulder of bacon, to grace the table 
at the head. A piece of roast beef adorns the foot, and 
a dish of beans or greens, almost imperceptible, stands 
in the center. 

“When the cook has a mind to cut a figure, which I 
presume will be the case tomorrow, we have two beef¬ 
steak pies or dishes of crabs in addition, one of each by 
the side of the center dish and dividing the space so that 
the distance from dish to dish is about six feet. Without 
them it would be twelve feet. 

“Of late the cook has had the surprising sagacity to 







BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


15 


discover that apples will make pies, and it is a question 
if, in the violence of his efforts, we do not have one of 
apples instead of two beefsteak pies. 

‘^If my guests can put up with such entertainment on 
plates, once tin hut now iron, although not by virtue of 
scouring, I shall he happy to see them. ^ ’ 

Among the guests whom Lieutenant Levi Holden 
helped Washington to entertain was Rochamheau. The 
ladies came in their ruffles and laces, to he met by Lady 
Washington, who wore a homespun apron and was using 
her time in the knitting of a stocking. 

‘‘We must become independent,’’ she told them gently, 
“by doing without those articles which we cannot make 
ourselves. While our husbands and brothers are ex¬ 
amples of patriotism, we must be examples of industry.” 

And, helping to wait on the guests at this simple en¬ 
tertainment, was the young lieutenant who wanted to 
fight but found his duty 
lying in a very different 
direction. 

Levi was proud, though, 
when the weary, triumph¬ 
ant Colonials marched 
through Philadelphia, 
dusty and ragged, but 
with their general at the 
head of the line. Levi 
headed Washington’s life 
guards with their flag, a 



The Minute Men 





16 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


figure in the uniform of the guard holding a horse by 
the bridle and beside it Liberty leaning on the shield of 
the union which was supported by an eagle. 

The guards looked very well in their uniforms; blue 
coats faced with buff, red waistcoats, white body belts, 
black half-gaiters and black felt hats bound with white 
tape. And their banner was of white silk, on which the 
emblems were sewed in colors. 

Soon Levi went home to Sudbury again. He brought 
trophies to lay on the shelf above the fireplace beside his 
grandfather’s silver one. No decoration for valor in bat¬ 
tle, not a scalp, not a broken sword, not his musket. No, 
indeed, none of these. 

Levi placed there a hand-spun and hand-woven night¬ 
cap, very snug and comfortable, which Lady Washington 
had made to keep him warm when he stood all night at 
guard at her doorstep. Arid, beside it, Levi laid the last 
bill for kitchen supplies, neatly approved and signed by 
General Washington. 

Levi Holden had stood and waited on his commander 
during the revolution, but he held in his heart the pride 
of knovring that he had helped make the union possible, 
and the life of its first president secure. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


17 


Visiting At Mount Vemon 



Washington's home at Mount Vemon 


Any boy or girl would have loved the great farm at 
Mount Vernon, where George Washington went to go 
on with his life after serving as the first president of 
the United States. In fact, it was not one farm but sev¬ 
eral; like a small village of which the big white house 
with its tall pillars, huge kitchen and many fireplaces 
was the center. 

It lay on the right bank of the Potomac Kiver, with 
Mr. Washington’s own wharf from which he shipped 
tobacco and flour and many barrels of shad and herring 
to England. He raised the wheat in his own fields and 
ground it into flour at his own mill, and every barrel of 
it was stamped, ‘^George Washington, Mount Vernon.” 
That meant that it did not have to be opened by the men 


18 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


at the customs house, for everyone knew what good flour 
was ground in Washington’s mill. 

If you could have paid a visit to Mount Vernon, long, 
long ago, in the year 1799, you would have started from 
the wharf and taken a walk to the different parts of the 
estate of Mount Vernon, each interesting in its own way. 

There was the Eiver Farm, with its tobacco fields lying j 
along the bank of the river. There was Dogue-Eun ■ 
Farm and Muddy-Hole Farm and Union Farm, named; 
after our country gained its independence, and the i 
Mansion-House Farm. There were ducks and roosters 
and chickens and mules and cows and pigs and horses; i 
all the four-footed friends that you love, and so did Mr. ; 
Washington. ] 

Martha Washington, at this time, had a very clever ! 

kind of a cat-hole cut in ; 
the wall of their house ' 
so that the favorite pus- | 
sy could come in on a 1 
cold night. It was hung j 
from a hinge at the top, ] 
and old letters say that ! 
this cat-hole opened] 
right into Martha Wash- j 
ington’s own room. 

Your walk about the 
grounds of Mount Ver¬ 
non would have taken 
you through the most 



Martha Washington 



BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 19 

delightful woods, for George Washington loved trees 
and believed that they should form part of a nation ^s 
wealth. He did all that he could to preserve his wood¬ 
land. A letter that he wrote to one of his farm superin¬ 
tendents at Mount Vernon, from Philadelphia, tells us 
this: 

‘Ht is much to be re¬ 
gretted,’^ wrote Presi¬ 
dent Washington, ‘‘and 
I do regret it exceeding¬ 
ly, that the honey locusts 
which have been set out 
should have perished. It 
would seem as if I never 
would get forward in my 
plan of hedging. 

“With respect to the 
transplanting of cedar, 
or any other evergreen, 

I am persuaded there is 
no other sure way of getting them to live than by taking 
them up in the winter with a block of frozen earth around 
the roots, and as large as can conveniently be obtained. 
This not only gives them their mother earth, but by its 
‘adhesion to the roots, it nourishes the body until the 
fibers from the former shoot sufficiently to secure the 
thriftiness of the plant. 

“I transplanted thousands of pine and cedar trees, 
getting scarcely any to live until I adopted the above 



George Washington 



20 boys and girls of pioneer days 

method; after which, so long as it was practiced, I 
never lost one. Witness the pine groves by the gardens! ’ ^ 
And we may read in Washington’s diary of March 21, 
1763, of a bnsy day spent in his fruit orchards. 

Grafted 40 cherry trees as follows: 12 Bullock 
Hearts, a large black May cherry; 18 very fine May 
cherry and 10 Coronation. Also grafted 12 Magnum 
Bonum plums. Also planted 4 nuts of the Mediterranean 
Palm in the pen where the chestnut grows. Set out 55 
cuttings of the Madeira grape. Directed the grafting 
or planting of Spanish pears. Butter pears, Black pear 
of Worcester and New Town Pippins.” 

Following the paths and trails of Mount Vernon, you 
would look in through the doorway of a pleasant school- 
house where the children of the Washington servants and 
farmhands were taught free. And you might chance 
upon a big barn known as the neighborhood corn-house, 
which was filled, through George Washington’s orders, 
with corn every year. This was for the sole use of the 
poor of the neighborhood, particularly the women and 
children, that they might be saved from want. 

He also owned several fishing stations on the Potomac, 
at which excellent herring were caught, and which, when 
salted, were an important article of food for the poor. 

For the good and help of his neighborhood, the mas-' 
ter of Mount Vernon set aside one of these fishing sta¬ 
tions on one of the best of all his docks, and furnished 
it with poles and nets and drying frames. Here the 
poor of the surrounding country might fish free, at any* 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


21 


time, by only an application to an overseer. And if a 
small boy made such a large haul that he had difficulty 
getting it to shore, by Washington’s orders, this young 
fisherman was given help with his net. 

Everything about the farm was ship-shape, and the 
best tools to be had at this time were provided. You 
may listen to Washington himself as he tells farmers of 
today how he felt about his business of agriculture. He 



General George Washington's Coach and Four 


wrote this in a letter to one of his Mount Vernon super¬ 
intendents : 

“I am never sparing, with proper economy, in fur¬ 
nishing my farms with any and every kind of tool and 
implement that is calculated to do good and neat work. 
I not only authorize you to buy the kind of ploughs you 
were speaking to me about, but any other tools the 
utility of which you have proved from your own experi¬ 
ence ; particularly a kind of hand rake which Mr. Stuart 
tells me is used on the eastern shore of Maryland, in¬ 
stead of hoes, for corn at a certain stage of its growth, 
and a scythe and cradle different from those used by 
us, and with which the grain is laid much better. 




22 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


short, I shall begrudge no reasonable expense 
that will contribute to the improvement and neatness of 
my farms for nothing pleases me better than to see 
them in good order, and everything trim, handsome and 
thriving. While nothing hurts me more than to find 
them otherwise, the tools and implements lying wherever 
last used, exposed to injury from rain and sun.’’ 

When you had finished your walk over the estate, and 
returned to the Mansion-House Farm, you would have 
crossed the threshold and gone into the library of the 
house. You would have stepped softly, for an old gentle¬ 
man with a powdered wig sat, wrapped in blankets, by 
the window. He was writing, in the winter sunshine, a 
letter to a man of whom he was very fond and in whom 
he placed a great deal of trust. This man was James 
Anderson, a Scotchman who was the superintendent of 
the Mount Vernon farms. 

Mr. Washington would surely have let you read the 
pages of his letter to his farmer, as he finished each and 
carefully dusted it with his sand sifter. He had his 
heart full of the welfare of his animals out in the barns 
that winter, and he was writing instructions about what 
he wanted done always to keep them comfortable. Dob¬ 
bin, patiently dragging the plough and the farm cart, 
looked from his honest eyes into his master’s as Wash¬ 
ington wrote about him. 

‘'The work-horses and mules must always be in their 
stalls when it is cold, and the stalls all littered and 
cleaned,” he instructed his farmer, “and they are to be 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


23 



Washington’s Secretary and Circular Chair 


plenteously fed with cut straw and as much chopped 
grain, meal and bran, with a little salt mixed therewith, 
as will keep them in good condition for work. See, also, 
that they are watered as often as they are fed. This as 
concerns their winter food. 

^^For spring, summer and autumn it is expected that 
soiling them on green food, first with rye and next with 
clover, with only a little grain, will enable them to per¬ 
form their work. 

‘‘The stables and farm pens ought to be kept well 
bedded and the stalls very clean for the comfort of my 










24 boys and girls of pioneer days 

animals. As straw cannot be afforded for the litters, 
leaves and weeds should be gathered for the stables, and 
leaves and cornstalks for the pens and the sheep runs. 
Let the cornstalks be cut down by a few careful people 
with sharp hoes, so low as never to be in the way of the 

scythes at harvest. And 
whenever the wheat will 
admit carts to run on it 
without injury, let the 
stalks be brought off and 
piled near my barns. 

‘‘In like manner let 
the people, with their 
blankets, go every eve¬ 
ning to the nearest 
woods to fill them with 
leaves, bottoming the 
animals’ beds with corn¬ 
stalks and then covering 
them thick with leaves. 
This will save food and make the beasts lie warm and 
comfortable.” 

Next there was a neatly written page to Mr. Anderson 
about the “Friendly Cow.” There was never a lack of 
rich milk and clotted cream on George Washington’s 
farms, and this was because he vas good to his cattle. 

“The oxen and other horned cattle,” he wrote, “are 
to be housed from the first of November until the first 
of May, and they are to be fed as well as the means of 



Folwell silhouette of Washington 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


25 


the farm will admit. The oxen must always be kept in 
good condition in their stalls and the cows, so many of 
them as can find places, in the barns. The rest, with 
the other cattle, must be put in newly erected sheds, and 
all carefully watered every day. The ice, in freezing 
weather, must be broken for them so as to admit them 
to clean water.’’ 

So this kind old gentleman wrote on. The pigs must 
be well fed and kept clean. The farm tools must be 
oiled and polished. One field that had been overworked 
with several crops should be allowed to rest for a year. 
Some of the apple trees and the berry bushes would need 
trimming later. 

There was not a single instruction put down that a boy 
or girl could not understand and help in carrying out. 
Much as you would have wished for the writing to go on, 
it stopped at last, and the orders were sent to the farmer. 

Mr. Washington leaned back among his blankets, not 
being very well that winter, and looked out over the 
white fields of Mount Vernon. He was not thinking of 
the Revolution, or the Declaration of Independence, or 
anything so difficult as these. He wanted to be sure that 
his barn friends were kept comfortable when he was not 
able to go out on his horse, riding the length of the farms, 
to inspect them. 

The next time you water a horse or gather some leaves 
and cornstalks to make a bed for a patient cow, would 
you not like to remember that this was what George 
Washington asked you to do? 


26 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The Penny of a Patroon 

The boy had hunted farther from the manor house 
than he had intended. Early that morning he had lost 
sight of its massive stone walls; its thick white door, in 
the top of which there was a round hole for aiming a 
musket through; its heavy, barred green shutters; and 
the fair gardens and high hedge of fragrant box which 
surrounded it. He had passed by the noisy, merry cab¬ 
ins of the blacks and the farther tenant-farms where his 
father’s workmen lived. 

With its many beautiful rooms, its massive furniture, 
its huge fireplace and its always crowded table loaded 
with rich food at all seasons of the year, the Morris 
manor on the Hudson, in the early days of Knicker¬ 
bocker New York, was very similar to that of the earlier 
Morris, this Gouverneur’s great-grandfather, who 
fought under Cromwell in England. 

The young lord of the manor had passed also, his gun 
over his shoulder and his head held high to breathe in 
the crisp air of the early fall day, the neighboring homes 
of the patroons, as the aristocracy of that part of our 
country was called at that time. Here lived his play¬ 
fellows, the boys and girls of the families of the Living¬ 
stons, the Schuylers, the Van Kensselaers, and the Van 
Cortlandts. 

What fun those children of the great landed families 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


27 


had in those days! Their houses and gardens were like 
old-time castles and their grounds, so one did not have 
to limit his company or his games. Christmas was 
ushered in with the boar’s head and the wassail, and 
Thanksgiving with a hundred guests to eat their fill off 
the heavy silver plate of the dining hall. 

Any day there might be a trip by coach to the little 



What fun those children had! 

town of New York farther down the Hudson; the boys 
dressed like their fathers in ruffles, silks and scarlet 
coats, with powdered hair, and the little girls in the most 
costly silks, satins, calicoes and chintzes. 

There were always outriders for a trip of this length, 
and you could tell whose coach was being drawn by the 
four great Flemish horses by its emblazoned family coat- 
of-arms; the lance for the De Lanceys, the ship of the 
Livingstons, and the castle of the Morris family with 
flames of fire shooting up from its turrets. 























28 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


But this lad, Gouverneur Morris, was thinking of noth¬ 
ing except the squirrels and hares which he hoped to 
bag. There might, he knew, as he skirted the bay where 
the Croton Eiver emptied itself into the Hudson and 
made a small lake full of striped duck and a harbor for 
canvas-backed ducks, be a deer or a wolf in the trail 
ahead of him before long. 

The wolf might not be so interesting, but Gouverneur 
held his body straight and with a fine disregard of 
danger. That was the bearing he had inherited with his 
inheritance of the patroon. He was an American boy 
who was not going to feel inferior to anything or any 
situation. He did not know fear. 

But a slight stir in the depths of the forest, a flash of 
a colored feather too long for that of a scarlet tanager 
or a wild turkey between the green of the pine trees 
stiffened the young lord of the manor into attention. 

The immediate stillness and the disappearance of the 
color gave him the impulse to shoot his musket at an 
unwary squirrel who came out to the end of a limb to 
chatter at this interloper in its woods. Gouverneur 
missed the squirrel and the swiftly flying, flint-tipped 
arrow that winged its deadly way out through the trees 
at him just missed him. 

He did not run. He stood there in the path, a trifle 
straighter, a bit whiter of lip. Suddenly an Iroquois lad, 
his bronzed body tense beneath his blanket and wearing 
the feathered crown of his family and castle, faced the 
white boy. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


29 


He pointed to Gouvernenr’s gun, then to the arrow in 
explanation. Then he indicated his packet of furs and 
his wampum belt to show that his was a peaceful er¬ 
rand; that he, at least, of that dread race of the Five 
Nations whose council fires stretched from the rising 
sun of eastern New York State to its setting at the west, 
was upon a peaceful errand. 

This Iroquois boy of the Bear family, not more than 
the patroon boy’s age, fourteen summers and winters, 
was on his way to trade at New York. 

didn’t shoot at you!” Gouverneur exclaimed. Then, 
seeing that the Bear boy did not understand him, he 
pointed to the squirrel, now back on his home branch and 
still scolding down at him. The Iroquois understood 
now. He showed his white teeth in an appreciative smile. 

The patroon lad examined the Iroquois’ beautifully 
embroidered moccasins and the burden strap, also dec¬ 
orated with dyed moose hairs and colored porcupine 
quills, by means of which, bound across his forehead and 
suspended by straps of deer-thong, the furs were fas¬ 
tened to his back. He wanted that burden strap to wear 
the next time the boys had a sham fight in the wide 
Morris meadows back of the pasture. He touched it. 
Then he turned out the pockets of his hunting breeches. 

They disclosed an English shilling and a Spanish 
doubloon, his sole wealth. 

The Indian boy laughed again as he pointed to his 
wampum belt, made of smoothly polished and beautifully 
dyed river shells. That wampum was the perfectly bal- 


30 boys and girls of pioneer days 

anced standard of currency of the Five Nations, and 
they were quite as rich a nation at that time as was the 
patroon community living on their threshold. 

Wide spreading acres of maize and vegetables, or¬ 
chards and vineyards in the lake section of their Long 
House, well-built castles of logs and a well-established 
trade in furs brought to them by the lake route from 
Canada—these were the wealth of the Five Nations. 

The two boys turned and walked back toward the man¬ 
or house together. Gouverneur discovered that the Bear 
lad could speak a little French, and he himself spoke 
French as well as English having learned it from his 
Huguenot mother. 

They exchanged stories about the growing village of 
New York, about its very interesting water front, its 
shops, and the difficulty of buying what one wanted with 
so many different kinds of money, brought in from every 
port on earth it seemed. 

As they parted at the gate of Morisania, where the 
Morris manor stood, the Iroquois lad bowed a formal 
farewell, touching his wampum belt in pride. He felt 
richer than this young lord, in spite of Gouverneur’s 
great house, his aristocratic surroundings and his coach 
standing just outside the gate with its blazing castle 
painted on the door. He would exchange his furs for 
cloth, salt, tools, knives, whatever his family needed, 
in New York, and his wampum would buy his way home 
to the Long House. 

The Bear boy light-heartedly shot a gay arrow into 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


31 


the air as ho went on along the hank of the wide flowing 
Hudson. That for English shillings and Spanish doub¬ 
loons ! 

The Morris coach, whirling past the groups of bob¬ 
bing tenant-farmers in their blue smocks and leather 
aprons, and with Gouverneur and his mother and father 
and little Betsy from a nearby manor inside, overtook 
the Indian boy the next day. Gouverneur ordered it 
stopped and asked him to ride at the back, but the boy 
declined. 

So they gave him a rare treat in a basket of food, fruit, 
twisted crullers and gingerbread cakes, and drove on. 
When they reached the outskirts of New York, the sights 
were so thrilling that the lad inside, in his best ruffled 
clothes, and the little girl, in stiff yellow brocade and a 
stuff cloak lined with white down, forgot the young Iro¬ 
quois. 

Wide distances, elm-lined streets beside gardens just 
yellowing with the fall, but sweet, nevertheless; the ham¬ 
mer of carpenters, the tap of the shoemaker, the ringing 
of the smithy's anvil, the scraping of the ivory turners 
and the cabinet makers, the noisy bargaining at the fur 
stations; the smell of the pies and bread from some home 
kitchen; and, as they neared the water front, pitch, salt, 
tea, spices—these caught and held the senses in old New 
York. 

Father Morris had business at court, being a lawyer 
of repute, so the boy and girl wandered about the town 
while Gouverneur's mother spent an engrossing hour 


32 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


with a dealer in wigs and scent. They fonnd their way to 
a furrier’s where there were displayed a most delight¬ 
ful row of small ermine tippets and muffs over which lit¬ 
tle Betsy exclaimed in rapture. 

Gouverneur, in a lordly way, pointed to the softest and 
most stylishly made set of all, again emptying his pock¬ 
ets. Alas, in addition to the shilling and the doubloon, 
all he had in the way of funds was a varied collection of 
ducats, sous and pistareens. The furrier shook his head, 
‘‘I get these with the docking of every sailing vessel,” he 
said. ‘‘A young patroon like you ought to have a pocket¬ 
ful of gold.” 

The lad drew his silver sheathed sword, a dark frown 
covering his face, but small Betsy began to cry and the 
shop keeper only sneered. ‘‘None of that, my young 
cock! ” he said. ‘ ‘ Days are changing, and a merchant is 
nigh about as good as a lord of the manor now. At 
least he can choose what kind of coin he will take for his 
wares.” 

In the face of Betsy’s wail, “I do not want the ermine, 
Gouverneur. All I want is for you to put your sword 
back in its scabbard,” there was nothing to do but com¬ 
fort and lead her to the nearest sweets shop. But the 
day was spoiled for the boy. 

When they returned to the manor farm, and supper 
was eaten, and he lay full length in front of the blazing 
logs whose flames cast odd shadows on the high wains¬ 
coted walls, Gouverneur began to think very hard about 
money. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


33 


He thought about the wampum of the Iroquois, which 
served them better than did the many coins of the pat- 
roons. Presently he got up, sharpened a new quill, 
ground some fresh ink and started making figures on a 
sheet of foolscap. 

Centime, that tiny French coin with which his mother 
as a little girl had so much frugal pleasure, buying a 
sweet, a bit of ribbon, or a doll with a few! Too French, 
though. Well, call it a cent; that was good English, the 
lad decided. Suppose one were to be able to have a five- 
cent piece, a ten-cent piece, any number of coins that 
could be multiplied and divided and otherwise computed 
by a decimal system? That would be nice and simple! 

Well this patroon boy grew up, and our country grew 
up even faster. He went, when he was quite young, to 
King's College, now Columbia College. Afterward he 
drove such spirited ponies that he was thrown out of his 
phaeton and his leg was so badly broken that it had to be 
amputated. But that did not affect his courage. And he 
watched America striding along with steps even longer 
than those of her boys. 

We were now an independent nation with thirteen 
states and our first president, and a Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence which every state loved and rewrote in its own 
special way. These separate writings were a kind of 
plantation covenant. Each one said that, ‘‘All men are 
by nature equally free and independent, have a right to 
enjoy life and liberty and acquire and possess property, 
be safe and happy and worship God in one's own way." 


34 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 



But we were going out west. 
We had difficulty in measuring 
and indicating the boundaries 
\ of the states. And how the 


In year 1783 
o were three mil- 

' silks T 1 j.T_ 

lion people, the aris¬ 


and Charleston had 


ships docking at 
Boston, New York 


increased in number, 
each one bringing in 
a bag of money from 
foreign ports! 


Little girls in most costly silks 


tocrats living as they had in France, Holland and 
England, and the pioneers struggling to develop our 
natural resources. Strangers were arriving by every 
ship, and not altogether welcome folk, either, for they 
could not read or write in many instances. Our dis¬ 
charged soldiers were gathered up the Hudson, at New¬ 
burgh, poorly paid, and inclined to make trouble, and 
about all the money we had in America was made in 
mints across the sea. 

English guineas and crowns, shillings and pence were 
paid for our food and clothing over the shop counters, 
mingled with French, Spanish and German coins. Some 
of the states were printing paper money, which was, of 
course, only a promise to pay gold which we didn’t have, 
and so not of much value. And we had an idea that we 








BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


35 


must buy so many things; so much finery, so many silver 
plates and teapots, such feathery bonnets and massive 
furniture! 

So the men who were trying to unite the whole country 
for its best good called a meeting, in the year 1787, at the 
old State House in Philadelphia. It was a secret, mys¬ 
terious meeting, with sentries at the door to keep out 
people who did not belong there, and with tanbark and 
sawdust carefully spread on the street outside so that the 
sound of rattling cart wheels would not disturb the con¬ 
vention. 

It was as if someone were ill up there in a big room 
underneath the Liberty Bell; and, in fact, the thirteen 
states were feeling rather unwell, for they stood alone 
and had not yet learned how to manage themselves 
successfully. 

If a boy or girl of today could have managed to squeeze 
between the muskets of the sentries and creep stealthily 
up the stairs of the State House at that time, he or she 
would have seen Mr. Washington, dressed in his best 
brocades, seated on a raised platform in a large, carved, 
high-backed chair. 

Courtly Mr. Jefferson was there, as was also round- 
faced, cheerful Mr. Madison in the plain coat he liked. 
And quite a young man, with a wooden leg but active 
nevertheless, was stamping around the room, declaiming 
about the need for the states being made, in a measure, 
obedient to the national government. And he talked, 
whenever he could persuade anyone to listen to him. 


36 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


about wanting to have some good American cents and 
dollars. 

‘‘A dollar is worth six shillings in Massachusetts, eight 
shillings in New York, seven and six in Pennsylvania and 
thirty-two and a half in South Carolina,’^ shouted young 
Gouverneur Morris. ‘‘Something ought to be done.^’ 

Something was done about it. That year, which was 
1787, the convention at Philadelphia, the states rati¬ 
fying, adopted the constitution of the United States, than 
which no other chart for the sailing of our ship of state 
has been found so right. Our currency, from the cent, 
dreamed of by a lad of the manor, was simplified and 
given to the people through the etforts of Mr. Jefferson 
and Mr. Hamilton. But the cent was Gouverneur Mor¬ 
ris ’ idea, and one can do quite a bit with our copper pen¬ 
nies if one only tries. And Gouverneur Morris it was 
who wrote the final draft of the Constitution. 

Mr. Morris believed in developing the waterways of a 
land, so the next thing he did was to originate and get 
under way the plans for opening the Erie Canal. And 
toward the last of his life he wrote this to a friend: 

“As yet we crawl along only the outer shell of our 
country. The interior excels the part we inhabit in soil, 
in climate, in almost everything. The proudest empire 
of Europe is but a bauble compared with what America 
will be, must be, in the course of two centuries, perhaps 
one.’’ 

We proved that also. "When we had saved enough of 
our copper pennies to take the risk, we went out West! 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


37 



If you could have lived 
in the small green town 
of Westboro, in Massa¬ 
chusetts, in the year that 
just preceded the Revolution, you would have had a sur¬ 
prise if you had walked out to the Whitney farm. 

It was just an ordinary farm with pleasant green 
fields, barns for the hay and the stock, and a comfortable 
white house with a big fireplace in the kitchen that 
burned huge logs and had an oven for baking pies and 
crusty loaves of bread. But the best part of the Whitney 
farm—at least so Eli, the Whitney boy of twelve, and 
you, too, would have thought—was Mr. Whitney’s work¬ 
shop. 

Not many farmers in those early days of our country 
had as many tools as the Whitneys; a complete set for 
cabinet work and a lathe, a work-bench and plenty of 
good pine and oak boards. Looking in pride, his hands 
in his homespun pockets, young Eli watched his father 
make chairs for the nearby farmers and wheels for their 


carts, turn bed posts and fence posts at his lathe and 
handle his hammers, chisels and gimlets like a master- 
craftsman, which Mr. Whitney really was. 








38 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


As soon as Eli was able to hold a saw and a jackknife, 
he used these in making small models of the things his 
father made, and more. Your surprise, as you came to¬ 
ward the Whitney farm, would have been when you heard 
the merry tune of a little fiddle coming from the work¬ 
shop out in the fields. Eli, this twelve-year-old boy, had 
made this fiddle, although he had never been taught the 
craft and had been obliged to find the right bit of wood 
in their forest for it, saving his few copper pennies for 
buying the strings. 

Not only had Eli made his fiddle but he had learned to 
play it with his hand-made bow and to bring some very 
gay measures from the strings, for there was one partic¬ 
ularly fine thing about this farm boy of olden times. He 
had made up his mind to train his fingers to do anything 
he needed to do. He knew that a boy’s fingers, and a 
girl’s, for that matter, hold magic in their muscles. Our 
hands are magicians. 

It mattered little to Eli Whitney that he had no games 
nor toys, and small time for fun after the farm chores 
were finished. He would just go to work and make some¬ 
thing, and have a better time than if his father had 
bought him the kite, the little wagon, or the fiddle which 
he made for himself. 

‘‘But don’t touch my watch, Eli!” his father told the 
boy sternly when the large silver timepiece, as big as a 
small clock of today, came to him from England by way 
of a sailing ship arriving in Boston harbor. Mr. Whit¬ 
ney kept the watch as shining as the face of the moon. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


39 


wound it regularly every night with its long key, and 
was the only farmer for many leagues who had a watch. 

Eli listened to its loud ticking proudly, hut never had 
a chance to put it in his own pocket. Indeed, it would 
hardly have fitted in. Then, one fateful day, the watch 
stopped. No amount of shaking, winding, or coaxing 
would start it. The wonderful silver watch from Eng¬ 
land was out of order and there was no watchmaker 
short of Boston to fix it. 

Every Sunday the entire Whitney family rode ten 
miles to church. They went on horseback, Eli riding with 
his father on the same horse. But the week that the 
watch stopped, Eli was taken ill. He had so much pain 
that his mother said he must have eaten too many pan¬ 
cakes and molasses. 

However it had happened, he could not go to church. 
But as soon as the family was out of sight across the 
fields, Eli felt better. He took the precious watch out to 
his father’s workbench, carefully opened the case and 
removed the entire works with his clever fingers. Yes, 
he had been right in his guess. There was a little dirt 
clogging the main spring, which was easily removed. Eli 
did this, cleaning the wheels also. 

But could he put the watch together again? Fathers 
were stricter in those days than they are today, and Eli 
knew that he had been forbidden to touch the watch. If 
he had hurt it, his father might send him to Boston as an 
apprentice boy as a punishment, and Eli loved the farm 
and the workshop at home. 


40 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 



“That would he as great a help as fighting** 


He had laid the wheels and springs of the watch ont in 
the position and order in which he had taken them from 
the watch. Now, with the same care, he replaced them 
until each was in its proper place in the case once more. 
He wound the watch. Oh, how wonderful! It ticked as 
usual, loudly and regularly! Eli worked a wonder in¬ 
deed, for those times. 

The watch went well after that, much to his father’s 
surprise, for Eli dared not tell him what he had done to 
it. He did not miss church one Sunday from that time 
on, although his conscience troubled him not a little be¬ 
cause of what he had done. 

Suddenly troublesome times fell upon the Colonies and 
this boy decided that he would try and make up for 












































BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 41 

what, in those days, was almost a sin. He made up his 
mind to go with the volunteers to battle in the Revolu¬ 
tion, as a drummer boy or one of the boys who carried 
water bottles in the rear of the army as Eli’s neighbors, 
brave young lads who loved their country, were doing 
every day. 

So there came a morning when the straggling army of 
farmers and villagers, the first minute-men of the Revo¬ 
lution, marched by the Whitney farm on their way to 
Boston. And Eli buttoned his homespun jacket, pulled 
his old fur cap down over his forehead, and started to 
join the army at the rear. But the leader of the troops 
stopped him. 

‘Hs that a workshop yonder, with a bench and tools 
and a small forge in it, boy?” he asked. ‘‘And to whom 
does it belong?” 

“That is our workshop, sir,” Eli told him proudly. 

“Well, then, can you not supply us with nails?” asked 
the man. “We need all kinds and sizes of nails; horse¬ 
shoe nails, nails for mending our wagons of supplies, 
nails for our broken shoe-soles. Supplying the Army of 
the Colonies with nails would be as great a help as 
fighting. ’ ’ 

That is how it happened that there was one less drum¬ 
mer boy in the war of the Revolution and the steady 
sound of busy hammering day and night in the Whitney 
shop. Eli, about thirteen years old then, was bending 
over the forge shaping and pointing iron nails that 
would keep the transports together, help tired horses 


42 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


along hard roads and carry along the weary feet of the 
Continental army. 

Almost any boy could have made nails, but hardly a 
boy of that period or of to-day would have stuck to the 
making of nails as Eli Whitney did during the Revolu¬ 
tion, or have made them so skillfully and so quickly. 

He knew that he was doing his duty right there at home 
just as much as if he had been beating a drum with the 
boys of the army. 

And one day, in the midst of his work, he told his 
father about the watch and his father did not have a 
word of blame for him. Wasn’t the watch going well 
still, and wasn’t he proud of his son’s nails? 

The war ended, leaving a new nation as helpless as a 
child who is learning to walk, but Eli went on working 
in steel and iron. He sharpened axes and knives. He 
made some of the new table forks which people of fashion 
were beginning to use, and he made blades for table 
knives. He sharpened jackknives, and he soon had earned 
for himself a most enviable reputation for turning out 

shipshape work. 

He needed a helper, 
so he started out on 
foot to try and find an¬ 
other boy to be his ap¬ 
prentice. On his jour¬ 
ney Eli Whitney found 
out that ladies were 
pinning their bonnets 



Whitney*s cotton gin 





BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


43 


on with hat pins. This was a new line of work. Eli and 
his boy helper went back and made ornamental hat pins. 
It was a thriving business. 

Our South, at that time, was beginning to be white 
with the beautiful bolls of the cotton plant. The whole 
country needed cotton for the looms and dyepots of the 
North. Housewives wanted snowy sheets and cotton 
spreads for their great four-poster beds. The boys were 
beginning to want ‘‘boiled shirts,” white and starched, 
to wear to the meeting-house on Sunday. The girls loved 
the pretty pink and blue calicoes, with figures and pat¬ 
terns of flowers, that the village stores were beginning to 
sell, and which clever hands could stitch into frocks for 
Sabbath wear. The cotton was needed for this demand 
but, ah! it was a slow process getting it in any quantity 
to the North. 

The seeds must be pulled, one by one, by hand, from 
their white lint. The finest cotton had the smallest seeds. 
If one seed were left in the cotton it was crushed in the 
machinery that manufactured the thread, and the dark 
oil of the seed spoiled the whole roll of cotton. Until this 
trouble was remedied the whole country would suffer. 
Speed in manufacturing is an important consideration. 

But one day something amazing happened down in Sa¬ 
vannah. There was a huge, interesting plantation there 
with acres of growing cotton, hundreds of men at work, 
gardens of roses, orchards of figs and a house full of fun 
and hospitality for boys and girls. It belonged to Mr. 
Greene, an important man of the South. And in the big 


44 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


parlor of that house a party was being held to demon¬ 
strate a recent invention. 

It was a simple bit of cylindrical machinery, small, and 
as easily turned by hand as a grindstone. But its long, 
sharp, iron fingers imitated those of the human hand. It 
took a bunch of cotton in its fingers and, with a few turns 
of the wheel, the fingers separated the seeds from the cot¬ 
ton and turned out the white cotton, free of the seeds. 

When it was perfected and equipped with belts and the 
power of running alone, this new cotton gin was going to 
make America great. Where one stalk of cotton had 
grown in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Geor¬ 
gia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, a thou¬ 
sand would rise. It was the most needed invention of 
the day. 

‘^Eli Whitney, that clever young man from Yale Col¬ 
lege, who came by ship to Savannah, invented this,’’ said 
Mrs. Greene. ^‘He came to visit us and he saw at once 
how we needed the cotton gin, but no one ever thought 
of anything so simple as making fingers out of iron to 
separate the cotton. He has worked with his hands from 
the time he was a little boy, and he paid his own way at 
Yale College. Now he has done a fine thing for his 
country in this invention. We all need to thank him. ” 

This was true, and there has been hardly an American 
of our history who did so much to help his country as Eli 
Whitney. The histories tell all about his greatness and 
the things the cotton gin did, but you never knew, did you, 
about his fiddle, his father’s watch, and young Eli’s nails 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


45 


and hat pins ? His own clever fingers invented the magic 
fingers of the cotton gin, and still they were just the 
same ten fingers that the boys and girls of the present 
day have! 

We had come to the time in our history when it was 
necessary for the states to 
work together; the north¬ 
ern states, where machin¬ 
ery had begun to hum, and 
the southern states in 
which the fabric of a na¬ 
tion’s prosperity was ris¬ 
ing with the new growth 
in the cotton fields each 
season. The great men of 
the times realized this. 

An old letter from Thomas 
Jefferson expresses this. 

It was kept, with pride, in 
Eli Whitney’s family for 
a long time. 

^‘My dear Mr. Whitney,” the letter ran, ‘‘As the State 
of Virginia, of which I am a resident, carries on house¬ 
hold manufacturing of cotton to a great extent, as I also 
do myself, and one of our great embarrassments is clean¬ 
ing the cotton from the seeds, I feel considerable interest 
in the success of your invention for family use. Has the 
machine been thoroughly tried in the ginning of cotton? 
What quantity of cotton has it cleaned on an average of 



Eli Whitney 


46 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


several days, worked by hand and by how many hands? 
What will be the cost of one of them? 

‘‘Favorable answers to these questions would induce 
me to engage one of them to be forwarded to Eichmond 
for me. 

“Your most obedient servant, 

“Thomas Jelferson.’’ 

We know that the cotton gin answered all these re¬ 
quirements and more. Its busy iron fingers were a means 
of uniting human fingers in a handshake of co-operation 
between two widely separated and different sections of 
our growing nation, the North and the South. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


47 




‘‘Tom, Tom, Sam Blanch¬ 


ard son! 


CouldnT talk, so away he 


run! ’ ^ 


The boys and girls of the 
little red school house near 
Sutton, in Massachusetts, 
followed the boy as far as 
they could, calling this dog¬ 
gerel rhyme after him, and 


then lost him in the woods on his way home to the 
Blanchard farm. Tom Blanchard stuttered. He was 
good at spelling and arithmetic and he could write a fine 
hand, but when he started to tell his classmates some¬ 
thing his tongue ran away with him. 

That was a pity, for young Tom was a good playfellow, 
if only the children had given him a chance to play. He 
was one of six boys at home on the farm, and they had 
no toys nor very much playtime, so Tom had to use his 
hands and his head in filling his few spare minutes with 
fun. 

He chuckled to himself now, as he escaped from his 
tormentors into the shadows of the forest. What did he 
care for their taunts! He had a secret that they would 
have given anything to share; something he had made 






48 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


but couldn’t tell them about. On he plunged until he 
came to a roaring little stream in the depths of the 
woods. There he sat down on the bank and rubbed his 
hands together in satisfaction. If only the boys had kept 
on a bit farther in his trail, but they were village boys 
and did not know the woods as well as did Tom. 

One boy, however, bolder than his fellows, had fol¬ 
lowed Tom. Hiram had pushed through the thicket where 
Tom went, far enough behind him so that Tom had not 
seen him. He peered in at Tom there beside the brook 
and then his eyes grew wide with wonder. He ran back 
to tell what he had seen to the boys in the village. 

‘‘You couldn’t have seen it, Hiram,” one boy said. 

“There isn’t such a plaything in the Colonies,” said 
another. 

“Take us with you to see it, then,” said the third. 

The next day was Saturday and as many boys as lived 
in the small village of Sutton, about a score, hurried with 
their Saturday chores and trailed after their leader, Hi¬ 
ram, to see the wonder in the Blanchard woods. They 
were skeptical. They thought that Hiram had been mak¬ 
ing up a tale for them, but boys of those old days of our 
country, about the year 1800 , were very honest. Life was 
too serious a matter and too full of hard work for them 
to be able to indulge in “make-believe.” 

So on they went, but Tom was there by the bank of the 
little forest stream ahead of them. He was surprised, 
scared a bit at first, to see them. Then, when they ex¬ 
claimed, asked him where it came from, if his father had 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


49 



“A little milir the boys exclaimed 


made it, and how much it had cost, Tom discovered that 
he could talk. He did not stutter a bit as he told how he 
had made this wonderful toy, every board and shingle 
with his own hands and his jackknife. 

''A little mill!'' the boys exclaimed. ‘‘Just like the 
village grist mill I'' 

Yes, there it was beside the stream, its wheel turning 
as the water rushed over it and its wooden sails flapping 
steadily. It had a door and two windows. It was cov¬ 
ered with cedar shingles that Tom had cut and smoothed 
with the greatest care. It was stout and the right size 
for a child of two or three to be able to stand up in. It 
was a wonder, and the boys grudgingly gave in to the 
fact that stuttering Tom was more clever than they. 
















50 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

They remained with Tom until the shadows of the for¬ 
est were too heavy for them to see to play, and every one 
of them knew that he would have to go without his sup¬ 
per. They left the little mill working away there in the 
woods, and they decided on their way home that they 
would never again call Tom Blanchard names. 

The mill in the forest would probably have had many 
boy visitors the ensuing days, except for the fact that a 
village blacksmith came to Sutton and set up his shop 
near the Common. Before that the farmers had driven 
as far as Worcester to have their horses shod. 

Many of the children had never seen a forge, with its 
shower of rosy sparks rising as far as the tree tops and 
the grimy, bare-armed blacksmith making his hammer 
ring upon the anvil. The boys stood in excited groups 
around the door of the blacksmith shop as they watched 
the dull, hard iron turn to a red-hot, pliable mass in the 
fire, and then saw it welded into horseshoes, wheel rims 
and sleigh runners as if it were as plastic as dough on a 
moulding board. 

The children had been watching the blacksmith for ten 
days, and it was coming on toward the season for the 
harvest, when they discovered that Tom Blanchard was 
not among their number. 

‘‘Maybe he^s bashful,Hiram said. “Come on out to 
his farm and ask him to have a look at the blacksmith 
with us. ^ ^ 

So the boys took the six-mile walk out to the Blanch¬ 
ard farm. Before they had reached it they heard a sur- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 51 

prising sound, the sonnd of a hammer on iron, softer hnt 
surprisingly like the ring of the blacksmith ^s hammer on 
his anvil in the village. As they came nearer, following 
the ringing blows, the boys discovered that the sound 
came from a shed on the Blanchard farm. They stole 
softly up and peered in the door. 

It was a miniature blacksmith’s shop that met their 
delighted eyes, with Tom himself the blacksmith! He 
had driven in with his father once to have a horse shod, 
and when he came home he had gone to work to make 
himself a play smithy. 

In the corner of the farmhouse attic, Tom had been 
saving a pile of scrap iron for some time, and he had 
chosen pieces from this pile for his blacksmith play. The 
shed he used had been full of plows and harrows, old 
hoes and spades, which Tom had moved to a corner to 
make room for his forge. 

The small forge was built of stones he had brought in 
from the pastures, and even had a little chimney. His 
anvil was a large iron wedge driven into a low block of 
wood. Of course, the forge was too small to fire the iron, 
but it was fun to pretend that the bits of metal he took 
from it were red-hot. These Tom hammered merrily on 
his little anvil. It was a splendid play, and the boys 
agreed that Tom had a lot more to him than they had 
ever thought. 

Tom’s father thought so, too, at this time. Tom was 
about twelve years old then, and it was the time when 
boys of that period began to think of leaving school and 


52 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


learning a trade. Farmer Blanchard thought that Tom 
ought to be a farmer but, when he saw the little grist mill 
wdiirring away in the woods and caught Tom trying to 
carry live coals from the kitchen fireplace out to his 
blacksmith^s shop, he decided that Tom should have a 
chance to learn to be a mechanic. 

‘^Next year you may go to Milbury to your brother's 
tack factory,’’ his father told young Tom. The elder 
Blanchard boy had a small shop in Milbury where twenty 
men and boys were kept busy manufacturing the tacks, 
in demand at that time for fastening the new flowered 
carpets to parlor floors. Working with him wmuld be 
fun, Tom knew, and he planned to go in the fall, but there 
was a harvest party in the village and he waited for that. 

It was held in the largest barn in the village, which 
happened to belong to Hiram’s father. Festoons of 
bright fall leaves and braided ears of yellow corn made 
the walls beautiful. There were piles of ears of corn to 
be shelled, and barrels of apples to be pared for making 
the strings of dried apples that would make apple pie 
and luscious applesauce, sweetened with molasses, for 
winter night suppers. 

Everybody turned to and helped his neighbor in those 
days. In between the songs and games and the fiddle 
music the boys and girls shelled corn and pared apples 
with deft hands. They had cotfee and doughnuts and 
bread and molasses and cake to their utmost limit, arid 
they worked the harder for the fun and food that sweet¬ 
ened the work. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


53 


Big brass lanterns and tallow drips lighted the barn. 
By their dim light Hiram saw the pile of apples that 
Tom Blanchard had pared. It was enormons! It was 
too large a pile for any boy, or a man for that matter, to 
have pared. 

^‘Who helped yon, Tom, yon sly one!’’ asked Hiram, 
bnt Tom Blanchard langhed as he shyly pnlled from his 
pocket and showed to Hiram an invention of his own that 
he had bronght to the paring bee. Hiram shonted. Others 
of the apple peelers came to look at the contrivance, and 
exclaimed as well. 

The invention was ah apple parer! It was small bnt 
it was made of wood and iron, and had a spindle on which 
the apple tnrned. A gange of wire on the blade kept the 
parings even and thin. This gange, as Tom prondly ex¬ 
plained, took the place of one’s thnmb and forefinger in 
gniding the blade. It was a very helpfnl invention in 
those days when apples formed so large a part of the 
family’s food. 

Bnt when Tom went, still only a boy, to his brother’s 
tack factory, his fondness for making things was dis- 
conraged. His brother had an adage, ‘Ht takes a knack 
to make a tack. No machine can do it!” 

So Tom headed tacks nntil he was very tired of it, and 
he watched a workman connt the hnndred tacks that were 
packed in the small bnndles to be sold nntil he conld 
stand it no longer. Tom invented a machine that was a 
little like a clock wheel. It advanced a tooth at a time 
as a tack was headed and, at the hnndredth tack, a bell 


54 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


rang. That made the elder Blanchard decide to give up 
his tack-making adage. 

So this boy, this Tom Blanchard, who is a real boy of 
our early history, spent his teens in working at machin¬ 
ery, going from one shop to .another, and always trying 
to make the work quicker and simpler; trying to devise 
an invention for some piece of work that had been done 
before by hand. Finally came Thomas Blanchard’s great 
contribution to the story of American invention. 

He never forgot his success in making the apple parer, 
its simple revolving motion, and the speed with which 
it turned out a pared, round, and well-shaped apple. 
Thomas Blanchard undertook the task of inventing a ma¬ 
chine that w^ould turn and shape wood as well as his ap¬ 
ple parer shaped an apple. 

We owe to this boy, who had such a turn for making 
things, the Blanchard lathe by means of which irregular 
forms could be turned out. A boy of to-day can under¬ 
stand the principles and the usefulness of this early 
lathe. It was originally designed and used for turning- 
out shoe lasts. Our country was having roads cut into 
it by the farmers, by the traveling tinkers and peddlers 
who stopped at the doors of isolated farms with their 
tools, cooking utensils, lanterns and candlesticks, and 
by the children who walked miles to the nearest school- 
house. There was a great need for quicker and better 
ways of making shoes. 

So, when this new lathe of Tom Blanchard’s invention 
was built, the shoe last, that before had been made pains- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


55 


takingly by band, conld be turned out in quantities by 
machine. A pattern-last and the block to be carved were 
fixed on the same axis and then revolved by a pulley. 
There was a sliding carriage on which pivots w^ere fas¬ 
tened from which the axles of a cutting wheel and a fric¬ 
tion wheel, equal in diameter, were suspended. The cut¬ 
ting wheel turned on a horizontal axis. 

The friction wheel was in contact with the pattern-last 
and pressed against it while in motion. As the lathe re¬ 
volved, the pattern, which had an irregular surface, 
caused the axis to approach and recede from this friction 
wheel. The wheel for cutting, in its corresponding revo¬ 
lution, removed wood from the block until a duplicate of 
the pattern appeared. 

This was the manner in which the Blanchard lathe suc¬ 
ceeded in turning out useful and intricate forms for that 
period of our history when the development of the coun¬ 
try had been handicapped by the lack of tools and ap¬ 
pliances. 

Then it was that the lathe for turning out muskets was 
invented. It carved so neat a gunstock that it hardly 
needed to be touched with sandpaper. There had been 
lathes before, but none for fine turning like this. A boy s 
air-gun could be made then, where before it was 
impossible because the stocks had been carved by hand. 
And Thomas Blanchard’s lathe was so successful that 
the smallest handles and spindles and rollers of wood 
could be made with it. 

We can scarcely limit the uses of the lathe in the life of 


56 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


to-day. Its principle, as exemplified in the Blanchard 
lathe, is applicable in the turning of a school child’s pen¬ 
cil box, the beautiful column which supports the entrance 
to the school or other public building, the Pullman trim¬ 
mings of the fast-flying Twentieth Century Limited train 
and the propeller shaft of the great ocean liner. 

The old records tell us that, before long, Thomas 
Blanchard had built a steam wagon that speeded along 
country roads a little as the automobile speeds to-day. 
But he was not above small tinkering. A teacher brought 
him a school slate once and asked if there was any way of 
making one with a wooden frame that would not break 
if a child dropped it. Wood and slate were costly in 
those days. Mr. Blanchard chipped off the corners of 
the slate until it was oval, made an oaken frame to fit it 
by bending a wire loop inside the wood, and there was a 
slate that wouldn’t break! 

Few boys, watching a great factory lathe at work, or 
using one of their own in their home workshop, know 
about this long-ago Tom who had to make his own play¬ 
things and even the inventions for doing this work. But 
he never forgot his own boyhood, nor what a boy likes, 
and Tom Blanchard was an example for the lad of to-day 
who likes to make things. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


57 


The Ship That Sang 

‘‘Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every threadbare sail, 

And give her to the God of storms. 

The lightning and the gale! ’ ’ 

Ann, standing in her best ruffled muslin and blue silk 
cape under the elms beside her gate, looked a bit scorn¬ 
fully at the boy in blue sailor ^s uniform who was leaving. 

“I mean just what I say, Isaac,she repeated. “I do 
think that you should have taken your uncle's advice and 
accepted his most kind otfer to see you through Yale Col¬ 
lege. A cabin boy, and a runaway boy at that! I thought 
better of you." And the little lady of old Saybrook, in 
Connecticut, tossed her curls and turned away from her 
boy friend, Isaac Hull. 

He tried to explain, to apologize for himself. “Ah, 
my dear Ann, if it had happened that you had been one 
boy of a large, poor family of seven, if you had lived al¬ 
ways beside the sea and loved ships all your life; if you 
weren't afraid of either the tides, or thunder, or light¬ 
ning, or any kind of storm; if," the boy's eyes were close 
to tears, “your father had been a captain and died in the 
service of the sea?" 

Ann still kept her pretty, rounded cheek, so like the 
side of one of the pink peaches in their wide orchard, 
averted from Isaac's pleading blue eyes as she replied: 


58 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


^ ‘ I am, as you very well know, Isaac Hull, one of seven 
daughters. I have never been afraid of thunder and 
lightning, and I never ran away from a good home just 
because I wanted the adventure of shipping in the Amer¬ 
ican Marine, as only a cabin boy. I like a hero! ’ ^ 

And, tripping daintily along the gravel path toward 
the wide white entrance of the Hart mansion, Ann left 
her sailor-boy friend to go sadly down the village street 
to the stage-coach stand from which he was leaving that 
night for Boston and his sailing ship, bound for the 
Indies. 

He knew that Ann Hart, his dearest little girl friend, 
was right. A boy who had been adopted by a kind rela¬ 
tive and given the chance to make a schoolmaster, or a 
minister or a merchant of himself, through being edu¬ 
cated at Yale College, at 
New Haven, should not 
have thrown away the 
opportunity as he had 
done. 

Indeed, Isaac Hull 
had seemed to be most 
ungrateful, a vagabond, 
wayfaring sort of lad, 
unable to keep away 
from the shipyards, the 
docks and the lading of¬ 
fices. But he straight¬ 
ened his shoulders in 



Ann left her sailor-hoy friend 









BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


59 


resolute pride as he stepped up into the crowded, lumber¬ 
ing stage coach and gave a last look at the tree-lined 
streets of Ann Hart’s town. He gritted his teeth. ‘‘She 
wants a hero, does she? Well, she’ll not see me again 
until I can measure up to that.” 

Ann did not reach the wide porch of her house. Look¬ 
ing backward after Isaac’s disappearing blue jacket, she 
sat down on the stump of their great oak tree, all that 
was left of the oak that had gone to Boston. 

The tree had gone to help in the building of a ship, and 
so stately and tough a ship that every family which had 
sacrificed a tree for the ship’s decks or masts or iron- 
strong sides, was proud of the sacrifice. There had been 
this advertisement in one of the old New England news¬ 
papers : 

“Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be 
ambitious to be foremost in hurrying down the timber to 
Boston where the noble structure is to be fabricated to 
maintain your rights upon the seas and make the name 
of America respected among the nations of the world. 
Your largest and longest trees are wanted, and the arms 
of them for knees and rising timber. Four trees are 
wanted for the keel which, altogether, will measure at 
least 146 feet in length and hew 16 inches square.” 

So one of the Harts’ mammoth oak trees had gone, and 
little Ann rubbed a pair of brown eyes that looked sus¬ 
piciously wet as she kicked her bronze kid slippers 
against its lonely roots. Their tree had gone to help 
keep American seas, and all the high seas for that matter, 


60 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


free. And Isaac was going to sea. Had she been a bit 
too severe? Ann wondered. 

The jonrney of the Harts’ w^hite oak tree to Boston 
had been like the traveling of royalty. The tree had met 
other great timbers along the road, all of them taking the 
same way from the wood lots and lawns of the surround¬ 
ing villages, where the trees had been hewed and hauled 
on ox-carts through the snowy streets of Boston. 

There had been cheering for the trees, as they passed 
the mill where strong duck for the ship’s sails was woven, 
then another mill where huge hempen cables were made, 
later to be hoisted on the shoulders of strong men and 
carried, to the tune of fife and drum, alongside the tim¬ 
bers to the shipyard. 

Strong ships were needed to preserve the commerce 
of our growing country. Its ports, harbors, bays, creeks, 
rivers, islands and seacoasts were open to anyone who 
cared to use them. And the seas were used by many 
powers, as they had been in the former days of the pirate 
ships. One captain could pursue another and scuttle his 
ship for its cargo if he had the speed and the guns. 

Ann’s oak tree had made planks for the deck of a 
frigate. Its ironwork was wrought by the Boston smiths. 
The frame was made entirely of live oak and all her 
planks were bent in without steam, for it was thought 
that steam weakened the wood. 

Mr. Hartley, in whose shipyard the ship was built, had 
six daughters and, being a rich man for those times, he 
sent across to England for six beautiful scarlet cloth 


BOYS AND GIRLS OP PIONEER DAYS 


61 



cloaks for his girls to wear to parties. But when the 
cloaks arrived, it was discovered that there was not 
enough of the right kind of cloth for calking the frigate, 
from which tall, slender masts raised themselves like 
slim fingers pointing to the Stars and Stripes floating 
from the port flagstaff. So the six Hartley girls tore 
their scarlet cloaks into strips and gave the cloth as 
their offering to finish the Constitution, for that was 
what the ship was named. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of the work of 
building the Constitution was the carving of her figure¬ 
head. From the days of the ancient Vikings, the sailing 
ships of the earth had been made almost human by means 









62 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


of the figurehead standing above the waves at their 
prows as the ship rode through stormy seas. 

A wooden fiddle, that symbol of pioneer happiness and 
cheer, stood on the bow of the Constitution. It was put 
there for her captain’s hope as the ship rode to storm or 
to battle, as if the winds and the waves, even the whistle 
of bullets, were to make an accompaniment for the song 
of a good ship’s courage. 

Being a free country is not so easy as it sounds. The 
states being independent, we had committed ourselves 
to the policy of a free sea. ‘‘Free trade and sailors’ 
rights!” men said to one another when they saw, through 
their spy-glasses, some ship flying a foreign flag lie in 
wait for and give chase to one of our frigates. 

And the year 1812 saw bitter warfare being waged 
about the new little town of Detroit, the outlet of the 
waterway of the Saint Lawrence through the Great 
Lakes. Here was a water route through Canada for for¬ 
eign powers, with the Indians for allies wherever and 
whenever they could be hired as allies. 

The West was opening, so full of adventure and dis¬ 
covery. 

“We have determined to maintain this place, and by 
Heaven we will!” said the captains of the West. 

But Isaac? Well, the boy did service on several mer¬ 
chant ships, cruising from Boston and Salem to the co- 
coanut and date-fringed shores of the tropics; washing 
decks, waiting on the captain, helping to load a new cargo 
of heavy barrels of whale oil at the north or bales of tea 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


63 


to the south, whichever it might be, piling sacks of pow¬ 
der and carrying around a basket of bullets when a pi¬ 
rate gave chase. 

Wrecked finally, he drifted home, partly with the tides 
which carried him along on a broken spar, and partly 
walking along the coast. But with him was his captain. 

Kisking his own life this boy, who was not afraid of 
a storm, had saved his captain when his ship went down. 

The Constitution, soon after that, needed a captain. 
Isaac Hull was still young, but he was offered the posi¬ 
tion as captain of this gallant, singing ship. A number 
of bags of gold had to be taken to Holland to pay the in¬ 
terest on the money we owed that country, so the Con¬ 
stitution, Captain Hull riding at her bow, did this errand 
for his country. On his return he went to Annapolis to 
get a cargo and crew for a new sailing, and was on his 
way to New York when something exciting happened. 

He was nearing port when he sighted four ships, flying 
foreign colors, coming very close. This was in the very 
warm summer of the year 1812, and the sea was smooth 
and calm, not making good sailing for a frigate. Isaac 
Hull, however, was not going to be chased, so he began 
hedging to clear his ship from pursuers. And what was 
hedging? 

Fancy a fine old sailing ship becalmed, and enemy guns 
behind her. Try to see her ships lowered, manned by all 
hands, and stout cables attached to the ship and to the 
boats by means of which she must be towed along by 
straining, weary rowers. 


64 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


Watch a gallant captain in cocked hat, small clothes 
and gold lace, pacing the deck of his deserted frigate; 
turning his spyglass first upon the approaching quar¬ 
tette of ships, then shouting orders and encouragement 
to his men! That was the way the Constitution won the 
race with the pack of hounds of the sea that pursued 
her, and reached port safely. 

The matter might have ended there but Captain Hull 
had to put out again in a few days, and the Constitution 
went with the idea of getting the Guerriere, one of 
her pursuers that lay in wait for an American ship. 

Getting ready for a sea fight in those days was like 
the stories of Captain Kidd or Treasure Island come 
true. The boatswain piped the call and the decks were 
spread with sand so that the crew should not slip in the 
blood which would be spilled. Fife and drum called four 
hundred men to stand in their places beside clumsy guns, 
with only tackle of wood, or to climb into the ‘Gops^’ to 
use their muskets. Pikes and cutlasses stood about. 
Captain Isaac Hull paced the deck in his proudly won 
uniform, calm, courageous, ruddy of cheek and looking 
death in the face with a smile. 

A volley of bullets, those from the Guerriere sliding 
olf the oak sides of the Constitution! She was dubbed 
Old Ironsides after that. A climbing crimson tower of 
fiame and then a cloud of smoke that obscured the tragic 
end of the Guerriere! It was all over in a few moments, 
but the first concern of Old Ironsides’ captain was to 
rescue the survivors. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


65 


As the captain of the Gnerriere climbed np the side of 
Old Ironsides, Isaac Hull helped him, his face drawn 
with sorrow at what he had been obliged to do. The two 
gallant captains faced each other and he of the lost ship 
offered Captain Hull his sword. The boy in Isaac, who 
believed in fair play and 
respected courage, made 
a gesture of refusal. 

‘‘Give me but your hand, 
sir,’’ he said. “I know 
you are hurt. I’ll trou¬ 
ble you for your hat, but 
I’ll not accept the sword 
of a man who knows so 
well how to use it.” 

About this time Cap¬ 
tain Hull, after having 
been given many medals 
and some prizes and a 
dinner in Faneuil Hall, 

decided to retire and look up the home folks. He 
had heard of an amazingly pretty girl, as good a house¬ 
wife as she was a belle of every country dance she at¬ 
tended. But the most amazing part of it was that she 
was still holding her heart for a very special kind of 
knight. 

It was said that this girl smiled less and less often, 
though, since she had unkindly turned away from her 
gate a friend of her childhood days, and the rumor 



The ^^Constitution' 




66 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


reached Isaac Hull that Ann Hart had said^ with a sigh, 
at a ball given in his honor in Saybrook, ‘‘Alack, how 
fine it would be to marry a hero! ^ ^ 

Isaac had paid very little attention to Ann at that ball, 
but when it was over he asked permission to walk home 
with her. And when they came to the gate leading to 
Ann^s house, she opened it to him, and they found room 
to sit side by side on the broad stump of the tree that had 
gone to Boston to build a ship. It turned out very well 
with Isaac and Ann, and they lived happy ever after, for 
a history story often has as good an ending as a fairy 
tale. 

And Old Ironsides lived happily too. The ship’s tall 
masts, her graceful yards, and the fiddle at her bow 
went singing through the winds and waves on many 
peaceful voyages after the war of 1812 was over. And, 
for many years, the high seas were free. 

iShe had other captains, as gallant in their way as 
Captain Hull had been in his, and when she began break¬ 
ing up, some of her old wood made a grand presidential 
coach, part of it made the front door of a Boston man¬ 
sion, and Old Ironsides was rebuilt as good as new. 

She stood, for a number of years, off Annapolis as a 
training school for the boys and young men who were 
going to have their own ships later, and in whom Old 
Ironsides could not help but instill a feeling of love of 
America as well as the taste of salt and adventure for 
which she had sailed. And, when we had finished with 
the Civil War and were once more ready to work and 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


67 


achieve through our arts and manufactured products, 
Old Ironsides went to Philadelphia to be one of the most 
interesting and prized exhibits of old-time days in the 
States. 

One last trip, before she went into dock for her illus¬ 
trious and peaceful old age, to and from France as she 
carried our American-made products to and then home 
from the Paris exposition in 1878! This was a prideful 
way for Old Ironsides to end her sailing days. If the 
freedom of the seas, for which she nearly gave up her 
life, stands for anything, it stands for the safety of the 
nation’s merchant marine. ■ 

If you were to go to Boston and take the way that 
leads to the great docks from which ocean greyhounds 
sail in safety every week with their cargoes of mail and 
people and goods, you might touch the barnacled sides 
of this old ship of our early struggles, the Constitution 
of the period of 1812, that valiant, singing ship which 
refused to sink. 

Old Ironsides has almost daily visitors. Women who 
knew the heart-break of losing their loved ones at sea 
have kissed her tattered sails. A splinter of her wood, 
even her clinging weeds and rust are precious and, al¬ 
though the fiddle at her bow is gone, the wind sings 
through her rigging, as it did in former days, for safety 
on the seas. 


68 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 



k iff iht 



Tom Creesy, thirteen years old, 
but big and strong for his age, 
stood at the wharf of old Boston 
and looked out at the clipper ship 
on which he was to sail for China 
in an hour. 


Ever since he could remember, 
Tom had cruised about by him¬ 


self in a dory at Salem, his home town, watching 
the shipbuilding and the launchings. Then he had come 
to Boston and got himself a job in one of the shops near 
the wharf, where he could see the ships, smell the sea 
and the fragrant cargoes of tea and spices as they were 
unloaded from the ships. Tom had only his grandmother 
and a brood of smaller brothers and sisters in Salem, so 
no one missed him. 

It was adventuresome in Boston just after the Revo¬ 
lution. Almost every week some ship would be getting 
ready for another long voyage to China or the Indies. 
Tom would look with longing at its tall, tapering masts, 
the wind-filled sails, the lofty yards and what seemed to 
him to be a perfect maze of blocks and slender ropes. 

How wonderful the ships’ figureheads were, particu¬ 
larly for a boy; carved figures of warriors or wild ani- 



BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


69 


mals set on tlie ship’s prow to lead it the trackless way 
through the waters. And all the ship’s extras delighted 
him; spare spars, gratings, capstans, boats, guns and the 
shining brass work that decorated the decks. 

So, when there had been a chance to ship for his board 
and a few pounds aboard the Ann McKim, Tom had 
jumped at it. She was a ship, even in those early days. 
Her frames were of live-oak, and she was bottomed with 
red copper, well suited to stand a sailing voyage to far- 
off China. She was trimmed with Spanish mahogany, 
mounted twelve brass guns and was well equipped with 
bells. 

She was planned to get to Canton in a bit over one 
hundred days, beating up the Chinese sea against the 
Monsoon at that. Lucky Tom to be sailing with her! 

But it was a gray day, and there was not another per¬ 
son for Tom to talk to there on the wharf; not a boy he 
knew, not anyone come to tell him Godspeed. All the 
way along the water front was busy with the craft of 
ship builders. You couldn’t see anything but the ship¬ 
building yards, the shops of the small boat-builders and 
pump-makers, the painters, carvers and gilders, the mast 
and spar-makers. 

All you could hear was the ring of the hammers and 
the caulking mallets. All you could smell was the sea, 
the odor of fresh hewn timber, seething Carolina pitch 
and the Norwegian tar that made the air heavy. 

Tom turned up the collar of his homespun jacket and 
shifted the bundle of clothes he carried on his back. 


70 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


There was a dampness in his eyes that was saltier than 
the mist of the water front. Tom, cabin boy on the Ann 
McKim, was homesick. He wished that he had someone 
he knew there to cheer him on the long voyage. 

He knew what the crew of the clipper bound for the 
Orient was likely to be; Spanish and Portuguese, French 
and Italians in scarlet shirts and carrying knives in their 
belts. They were a rough crew. Tom thought of the 
lonely tides he must face and he was, for the moment, 
afraid. 

‘ AVhat is the matter, boyP^ 

Tom jumped as a soft hand touched his rough sleeve. 

He turned to look into the eyes of one of the sweetest 
little ladies he had ever seen, a little girl of perhaps nine 
years. She wore a long traveling cloak of some soft, 
crimson stuff and the smallest red boots. Beside her 
was her maid, a tall, dark woman from the Indies, wear¬ 
ing a yellow kerchief on her head and carrying on her 
broad shoulders a small haircloth covered trunk. 

‘‘You look as lonesome in this bleak Boston as I feel, 
boy,’^ the little lady continued. “I am waiting here for 
my grandmother’s coach-and-four to take us to her 
house. Old Madam Coleman, she is, and I am sent here 
alone from my father’s plantation in Barbadoes to go to 
school in Boston.” 

She, too, shivered, drawing her cloak more closely 
about her. “I shall hate it, I know. I dislike these win¬ 
ter winds, and I shall dislike Madam Coleman’s large, 
dark house on the Common. My father has always al- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


71 



^^What is the matter, hoy?'’ 


lowed me to do as I wish, but I fear that my grandmother 
won't. I'm homesick!" The strange little girl put one 
gloved hand to her eyes as her maid took her hand to 
lead her away. 

Tom followed. Don't you cry," he said. ^‘I'm lone¬ 
some, too, because I'm going to China in just a little 
while now. If you'll tell me your name. I'll try and bring 
you back a present if I can find you when I come. It's 
a long voyage, you know." 

“Oh!" her eyes shone. “They call me Missy," she 
told him, “although my real name is Sally. Bring me a 
toy from China, I pray you! And here, to help you re- 














72 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


member, write it down and keep tbe pencil from me. It 
has real India rubber on the end! ’ ’ Sally thrust a lead 
pencil, a treasure in those days, into Tom’s hand from 
its hiding place in her long sleeve. Then she was gone, 
as a coach drove up and enclosed her and the dusky maid 
within its painted doors. 

The creaking of her masts, a trembling of the timbers 
as if they, too, started with dread upon the venture, and 
the Ann McKim dipped into the sea and was otf. Tom, 
cold, tired, sometimes beaten, took up his work of wash¬ 
ing dishes, scouring brass work, and waiting upon the 
captain who, in his dignity as the commander of the fast¬ 
est sailing vessel in the clipper trade, never spoke a kind 
word to Tom. 

A fine captain he was in his blue coat with velvet la¬ 
pels, bright gold trimming and yellow buttons with the 
ship’s crest on them, waistcoat and breeches of deep blue, 
cocked hat and side arms. A day was coming when Tom 
would wear that uniform, but he did not know it then. 

Tom slept in a hammock, with his small blue chest un¬ 
derneath. He must see that the copper pots, the kettles 
and the tin pannikins were clean and bright and in their 
proper places when the captain, wearing his white 
gloves, came to look them over. On Wednesdays and 
Saturdays he had to help wash and holystone the deck. 
He saw unruly sailors trussed up for punishment with 
the cat-o-nine-tails, and he hoped this would never hap¬ 
pen to him. And he grew lonelier each day on the high 
seas. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


73 


The days were shorter and the nights colder. Snow 
squalls gathered on the edge of the sky line, and the clip¬ 
per lifted herself out of the sea in the gales, seeming 
ready to turn right over as her belaying pin and heavers 
rolled about the deck. The albatross and wild pigeons 
screamed in a ghostly way among the rigging and Tom 
felt as if he hadn’t a friend in the world. 

But, no! When his day’s work was done and he could 



curl up in his hammock, he would pull out that precious 
pencil with its India rubber end, remembering as he did 
so the kind little girl who, in her loneliness, had noted 
his sorrow so long ago on the Boston wharf. 

^^I’ll stand this voyage for her,” he said to himself, 
^^and bring her a toy from Canton.” 

Then one morning, one hundred and nine days from 
the day when she had weighed anchor in Boston Harbor, 
the clipper ship, the Ann McKim, found herself in 
strange company. She was in a harbor that was as blue 
as the sky which shone above her. 







74 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

She was surrounded by the oddest little Chinese junks 
with colored sails and bearing cargoes of fragrant cases 
of tea, strange fruits, bales of gaily colored silks and jars 
of rich conserves. The oarsmen were as gaily dressed as 
was the day with its blue sky and gold sunshine. 

The Ann McKim dropped anchor and Tom, with a few 
shillings to spend, had leave to go ashore for this day 
while the cargo of tea was taken on and stored in the 
ship^s hold. 

But where, in this maze of narrow, crowded streets, 
could he find a toy for Sally? Fish shops, lantern shops, 
small, low houses half hidden behind low dwarf trees and 
tiny bridges, slant-eyed boys at play in the street who 
chased Tom, pointing at his worn ship^s jacket and 
tanned face and laughing at his close cropped hair! 

It was like a dream but at last, late that afternoon, 
Tom came to a shop where there were toys for sale. And 
set in the midst of the kites and colored balls and odd 
dolls was the oddest toy of all, a small tin coach for 
dolls. 

How it came there in a Chinese shop, or who had 
thought of shaping so perfectly its little windows and 
the hinged door, its painted wheels and prancing horses, 
no one knows, but there it was. It was just what Tom, 
cabin boy of the Ann McKim, wanted for Sally. 

The Chinese shopkeeper, as yellow and wrinkled as 
ancient parchment, shook his head as Tom showed him 
all his money. The coach, he tried to explain, was not 
for sale. Tom begged in English. The Chinaman ar- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


75 


gued in Chinese. Tom doubled up his fists. The China¬ 
man quietly took down a long, curved blade from a row 
of swords that hung on his wall. 

At last, Tom took out his precious pencil and held it 
out to the Oriental. He took it, fingered the rubber, tried 
its lead on a bit of thin paper. Then he smiled and put 
it up his satin sleeve as he handed Tom the wonderful 
little tin coach wrapped up in a piece of old blue silk 
brocade. 

It was late and Tom would feel the cat-o-nine-tails, 
he knew, if he did not get back before the clipper weighed 
anchor farther out in the bay for the night. It took all 
his money to bribe a Chinese junkman to ferry him out 
to the Ann McKim. Once there, he hid the coach in his 
blanket, for the rough sailors of the ship would have 
broken it in rude sport if they had seen it. 

Then came the longer voyage home, three and a half 
months more of rolling seas and back-breaking work for 
the thirteen-year-old boy, before Boston harbor was 
sighted. But that spring, when the Ann McKim docked 
safe home with a fine cargo of tea, Tom started for the 
Common and the mansion of Madam Coleman, the grand¬ 
mother of his little friend from the Indies. Under his 
shabby arm he held closely a bundle from a Chinese toy 
shop, wrapped neatly in a bit of old blue brocade. 

It was not difficult to find the house, with its fan win¬ 
dow of pale green glass over the white front door and 
its polished brass knocker. Madam Coleman, in stiff 
black silk and white lace cap, answered Tom’s knock her- 


76 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

self, bnt when he made known his errand she frowned 
and shook her head. 

‘‘My granddaughter is not here,’’ she told Tom. “Her 
stay with me was hut a brief one, after she had given a 
party with the renmant of the sweetmeats she brought 
on the ship. The child was well and brisk, but she wished 
to have her own way. 

“She would not go to school nor to church, and she 
wanted a new muff and many other things that she did 
not really need. She has run away from this house with 
her maid, and I am told that she is boarding at Mistress 
Binning’s. I wish to have her taught to sew, write and 
cook, but she has been sadly spoiled.” And Madam 
Coleman closed the door on Tom. 

Tom thought a moment. Poor, homesick, naughty lit¬ 
tle rich girl! He knew how she felt, but the voyage to 
China had done something for him. The hard work and 
the loneliness of the high seas had made him feel like a 
captain. His heart had swelled with new courage. He 
must hunt up Sally and tell her about it. 

So this was what Tom did. In the parlor of Mistress 
Binning’s boarding house in Boston, Tom sat on one stiff 
chair and Sally on another, he in his sea-faring jacket, 
and she in yellow silk brocade and holding a feather fan. 
He told her of his voyage and asked her to be as brave 
as he had tried to be, and go back to her grandmother 
and her lessons. 

Then he unrolled the bit of old blue silk brocade that 
smelled of spices and almond blossoms, and there, in all 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 77 

its delights, was the little Chinese coach of painted tin, 
for which Tom had bartered his precious pencil and 
nearly taken a hiding in capturing it for her. Who could 
resist it! Not Sally, who went home to her grandmother, 
the Chinese coach held tight in her happy arms. 

She grew up, so the old history papers tell us, to be a 
splendid, useful girl of New England. The cabin boy of 
the clipper was at last its captain, and a little tin coach 
from China may be seen to-day among the toys of yester¬ 
day that have been photographed for museums of our 
country, because they made history quite as truly as did 
the battles and all the schoolbook dates. 

So, also, was American shipping beginning to make 
history, for we had learned that we could not produce all 
the food we needed and that our larger houses and grow¬ 
ing social demands created needs which could only be 
supplied from the ports and marts of the old world. 

We could drink all the tea we wanted, providing we 
could get it. Tea is a commodity which, if it is kept 
long in a ship’s hold, quickly loses its delicate flavor. So 
large prizes were offered to the masters of the clipper 
ships for the shortest voyages and the largest cargoes 
when Captain Cressy^s ship, or any other, returned to 
port. For a long time our American ships were the 
racers of the sea. There was one of our clippers, of 907 
tons and built in 1842, the Sea Witch, that caused some 
talk among foreign shippers. She could carry 1,100 
tons of China tea, and make the trip from Boston to 
Hongkong and back in record time. 


78 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


It would have been thrilling to see Captain Cressy’s 
ship dock when Sally was a young lady, perhaps expect¬ 
ing a rarer gift than that of the toy Chinese coach. 

There might be a teakwood chair, carved in fierce and 
gilded dragons, or a sweetly perfumed chest of yellow 
camphor-wood gracing the clipper’s hold. Sandal-wood 
fans and hair combs of delicately carved tortoise shell, 
spices and sugar from the Indies for making a wedding 
cake taste of the East, black coffee and thick golden mo¬ 
lasses from Rio, a length of figured silk and a pair of 
tiny brocaded slippers from France—all these the swiftly 
sailing ships of our first merchant marine brought to 
Beacon Hill, and The Bowery, and to the stately Battery 
of old Charleston. 

Flour and pepper, oil for the lamps that were taking 
the place of the former hand-dipped candles, beautifully 
woven shawls of Cashmere that brought the colors of the 
Orient to a new country which had been able to spare 
little time for color before, an amber necklace and a pair 
of coral eardrops in return for fighting the tides and 
gales for months to and from the Cape of Good Hope— 
these the courageous Captains of the clipper-ship era of 
America brought home to the Sallies for whom they voy¬ 
aged. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


79 


The Covered Wagon 

Benny Goodyear stood, his blue eyes shaded with one 
hard, freckled little hand, to look up the Lancaster turn¬ 
pike for the first wagon of the expected wagon train. It 
was an event when the long line of canvas-covered Con¬ 
estogas, the ships on wheels of that mysterious, unknown 
tract of our country stretching from Pennsylvania to the 
trading town of Saint Louis, came home. 

The wagon train brought a cargo of corn, oats, wheat, 
coffee, bacon and ores which the West could give the 
East in return for the loads of cotton cloth, fish, salt, 
molasses, boots and shoes and notions from the East. 

Benny^s father kept the largest tavern at Lancaster, 
and in the great stable yard a ring of these schooner¬ 
like wagons would be drawn up for the night. Their tired 
drivers gathered around the big tavern stove, eating 
roasted oy^ers and telling of their adventures on the 
road until late into the night. 

Benny helped with blanketing the horses and filling the 
great feed boxes, built on the back of each wagon, with 
oats furnished by the inn-keeper for these honored 
guests. A nation on wheels we were, and we were just 
beginning to find out how vast our country is and how 
important were the wagon routes going West and con¬ 
necting with the flat boats and the river steamers for 
opening up inland trade. 


80 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The boy was proud of the turnpike road as he stood 
there waiting for the first glimpse of red on a horse’s 
head tassels of ribbons, or the first jingle of a wagon’s 
triumphant harness bells. 

The Lancaster turnpike was a new and good road, 
made partly of stone. Tauser, Benny’s dog, ran up and 


PtilUOUPUlA TO PITTJ6UR4 



Model of a Conestoga wagon 


down it, barking at the equipages which passed in the 
sunshine of a late afternoon of the fall. Two-wheeled 
private carriages, an occasional brightly painted stage¬ 
coach, big Dutch farm wagons loaded with vegetables 
and fruits from the fertile orchards of Pennsylvania- 
all these went by with a great rattling of wheels, but the 
wagon train was not yet in sight. 

Suddenly, though, Tauser ran madly ahead, fairly 
bursting his throat with his excited yelps. A bit of red, 
and then a shimmer of blue and white appeared against 
the setting sun. The first of the wagons was in sight, 
lumbering along like a clumsy wain of some old English 
road. At last Benny could make it out plainly! 

Any boy or girl would have been thrilled at the sight. 






BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 81 

knowing what adventures along the wilderness roads and 
among the Indians the covered wagon rolled through, 
its great canvas top billowing in storms, its wide wheels 
fording waterways where formerly only the Buffalo and 
deer or the canoe had splashed. 

But Benny Goodyear had reason to be particularly 
proud of the covered wagon. It had been built and started 
out West from Pennsylvania, the land of sunbonnets and 
accordions, of ploughs and loud, slow-striking clocks that 
never ran down while there was a chore to be done. 

The six horses drawing the swinging wagon came in 
military order, the heaviest ones nearest the wheels and 
then graded for rank and size. Their back-bands were 
fifteen inches wide, the hip straps ten, and the traces 
were great iron chains. 

They had a fine housing of deerskin, trimmed with 
heavy red fringe, and the headstalls were decorated with 
brightly colored ribbons in bunches and with bells. They 
came trotting bravely to the snapping of the driver’s 
great blacksnake whip. 

Now the lines of the Conestoga itself were to be seen, 
like the outline of a ship, the ends of the wagon higher 
than the middle by as much as twelve inches so that it 
would take the hills better. The under-body was painted 
bright blue; the upper was painted red and had over it 
the hoops of white canvas top. Red, white, and blue, the 
wagon train approached Lancaster to the tune of its 
whips and bells. Benny ran down the road and home as 
fast as his hobnailed shoes would take him. 


82 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


^ ‘ The wagons are on the tnrnpike! ^ ’ he shouted as he 
went. And with his call, doors were half opened to allow 
housewives in caps and plaid shoulder shawls to peer 
out, then fumble in their apron pockets for a coin or two. 

There might be a ‘‘fancy’’ wagon bringing up the rear 
of the train, a peddler’s cart, in which would be bolts of 
brightly figured calico, ribbons, needles and pins and per¬ 
haps white cotton gloves for wearing to church. 

This peddler would be a pleasant fellow, full of gossip 
about the towns through which he had come; Pittsburgh, 
the trading town of the West, Vicksburg where they were 
making toys for children, Statler’s where solid millstones 
could be bought at from fifteen to thirty dollars a pair, 
but the peddler would loudly praise Pennsylvania. 

“Have you a bowl of your rich bonny-clabber for me, 
Tilly,” he would ask of some little maid with long tow- 
colored braids and rosy cheeks, “in return for a tune on 
my fiddle ? ’ ’ And to some plump farmer’s wife, ‘ ‘ Is your 
maple sugar going to run to fifteen hundred pounds again 
this year, and will your fat coach-horses take first prize 
at the Lancaster Fair?’^ 

But Benny and Tauser had small use for the peddler 
with his smaller cart and fine manners. Almost before 
they reached the inn, the town was given over to the 
wagons. Sixty teams were drawn up, like a colored fleet, 
around Tommy White’s, The Butter Monkey, Samuel 
Barnhart’s and the Goodyear taverns. 

The drivers, rough, brave men, poured into the wide 
kitchens and tap-rooms, leaving the wagons and horses 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


83 



The first of the wagons was in sight 

to the care of stable-hands. Benny, Tauser trying to 
help by snapping at the horses^ heels and so keeping 
them in line, began his work. 

The boy got out the gear-poles—long, light sticks 
something like fence rails—and stuck one through the 
spokes of the back wheels of each wagon for a brake. 
Standing up on his toes, he threw heavy, homespun blan- 















84 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


kets over the tired, sweating horses. He held feed bags 
np for them to eat their supper. His work finished, he 
listened, at the tavern fire, to the talk of the men. 
can do twenty miles a day with Inck.’^ 

‘‘The old man who keeps the North Mountain Gate 
told me he has counted a good bit more than six thousand 
wagons going west since he’s been toll-man there.” 

“It’s good to hit a turnpike after a corduroy road! 
Plank and pine are all they can build out AVest and we 
take to the Indian trails in part, but one driver was tell¬ 
ing me we’ll soon have three thousand miles of good 
turnpike from the coast to the Mississippi.” 

‘ ‘ My wagon can haul ninety barrels of wheat flour. ’ ’ 

So the talk mingled with the sound of a banjo and an 
accordion, the snapping of roasting chestnuts and the 
clink of empty oyster shells thrown into a tin pan. It 
was warm in the kitchen. The light from the open door 
of the stove, the gleam of the polished pewter on the man¬ 
telpiece and the bright-colored plaid of the drivers’ 
woolen shirts made Benny’s eyes blink. He sat and 
dozed on the settle, about to go off to sleep, when some¬ 
thing aroused him with a start. His father was speaking. 

“Lost your dog, did you, on this trip? Shot by the 
Indians? Yes, I know how you need a dog to run along 
beside a wagon and give the alarm in the wilderness. 
Here’s our Tauser, a good, strong hound-dog, and my 
boy Benny’ll be proud to send him out with you along 
with the wagon train, won’t you, Benny?” 

It was not the sleep in his eyes that made Benny cover 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


85 


them up with the outgrown sleeve of his jacket, but a 
lump in his throat that made it impossible for him to 
answer. His father shook him gently. 

‘‘Wake up, Benjamin! Here’s a man says he’ll take 
Tauser out West with the wagon train. Stand up and say 
you’ll be pleased to have Tauser go.” 

“Yes, sir. I’ll be pleased, sir, to have my dog go with 
you I” Benny stood up and tried to speak with the cour¬ 
age of a pioneer, but Tauser was snuggling a loving, cold 
nose in his hand, and the two laid awake all night in 
Benny’s corn-husk bed in the attic. A boy and his dog 
were as close to one another then as they are to-day. 
History repeats itself, and does not change in any way 
except when an aeroplane skims the trees below which 
the covered wagon left its valiant ruts. 

At this time, the year 1820, a queer, old-fashioned 
steamboat left the bayou outside of New Orleans with a 
cargo of sugar, cotfee, molasses and hides, to take its 
hazardous way up the Father of Waters, the sluggish, 
broad, wonderful Mississippi, to Saint Louis. There, 
with good luck, a wagon would meet it with the flour, 
bricks and other necessary supplies from New England 
and the coast, for its return trip South. 

The steamboat had passengers also; fine gentlemen in 
high silk hats, ladies in crinolines and the most beautiful 
feathered bonnets, rough traders and planters going 
North to follow the desert which lay to the West or stake 
out claims in the rich, blue-grass bottom-lands of Ohio. 
And there was a little girl traveling alone. 


86 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


She was a very dainty little French girl named Clo- 
tilde, and she was in care of the captain, on her way to 
her father and mother who were stationed at Washing¬ 
ton, her father being in the government’s employ. She 
wore her stiff silks and embroideries, her wide-spreading 
hoopskirt, and her silk bonnet, like a princess. 

She had an ermine-trimmed cape and a small ermine 
mutf in which to hide her little fingers when strange peo¬ 
ple on the boat would have kissed them. She sat continu¬ 
ally on the upper deck, watching the pole-men below her 
who had to propel the boat along through the shallows. 
Her full skirts were spread out over her tiny red kid 
boots, but she was close to tears with her loneliness and 
the strange shores they passed, each morning stranger. 

New Orleans was a sunny, gay, rather crowded city 
then. It had connections, not only with the seacoast by 
means of the fast clipper ships but, two years before the 
Clermont had made such a sensation by steaming up the 
Hudson, a steamboat sailed down the Ohio Kiver to New 
Orleans. And now there were steamers being built in 
Pittsburgh for the river trade between New Orleans and 
the West. Double-deckers these odd arks of the river 
were, the engine raised out of the hold. Some could 
make the round trip from New Orleans to Louisville in 
forty-one days. It was a wild, lonely trip, though. 

Little Clotilde felt as if she were passing’along foreign 
shores as she watched the changes in the banks of the 
river. Beyond Baton Bouge the tall locust and cotton¬ 
wood trees and the live oaks, bound together in jungles 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


87 



And there was a little girl traveling alone 

by the brilliant-flowered vines, were lost in the panorama 
of the swelling hills on which small houses of wood 
seemed to have been dropped by a magician’s hands. 

She saw black and white goats in the flocks, the wide 
cotton fields, and the red-brick sugar houses of the plan¬ 
tations. But the river itself was a broad, many-colored 
solitude, more terrifying than the forests. 

Flatboats came in sight once in a while, their cargoes 
poled along by singing boatmen. The steamer had to 
skirt river islands, made of driftwood upon which mud 
had clung until this soil had caught seed and bloomed 















88 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


into wildflowers and made itself green with yonng trees. 

Alligators came to the surface of the water to sun 
themselves alongside the terrapin on old logs. By night 
there were fires and torches, placed at distances along 
the shore, to guide the boats among the treacherous 
snags. But the going was hazardous. The passengers 
never knew when the paddle wheel would stop and a cry 
ring out, ‘‘The boat^s struck a leak! We’re sinking!” 

And as this waterway of our new West was opening, 
the train of covered wagons from Lancaster, the head 
wagon led by a dusty, limping, proud dog named Tauser, 
took its way toward the meeting of the docks and the 
wagon trails at Saint Louis. The trail had met and 
joined forces with an emigrant wagon train from New 
England and New Jersey, its canvas tops sheltering the 
family furniture, the farming implements, food for the 
trip and the children. 

You could tell the New England wagons, for the 
mothers rode on horseback, ahead of the men even, sing¬ 
ing as they went. The New Jersey women were not 
hardened enough yet to ride outside. The sunbonnets 
from Pennsylvania, going out to keep log homes in the 
West, rode inside the Conestogas, mourning for the tulip 
china and the waxed-wood floors they left behind. 

But nothing could equal the courage and joy of Tauser. 
He had left Lancaster with his tail between his legs, re¬ 
membering his little master’s face when he had tied a 
bell and a tassel to his collar to match his wagon. 

However, the first night out, when Tauser had watched 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


89 


the driver take out a bundle of hay from the feed box for 
the horses, he had seen the bundle amazingly come to life. 
A freckle-faced boy in a homespun suit and a cap made 
of coon-skin, a plaid muffler wound around his neck, and 
his axe stuck in his suspenders, came out of the hay. 
‘'Benny, by my bones!’' barked Tauser. And Benny it 
was, going West with his dog and the covered wagon. 

Eunaway Benny had to make himself useful gathering 
firewood for the great fires around which, at night, the 
fleet of the wagons drew up and the emigrants and trad¬ 
ers gathered for bacon and cornbread, singing to the 
fiddles and then getting an uneasy night’s sleep. He had 
to bring heavy buckets of water and tend tired, cross 
babies, and watch for the fires on the hills that were the 
smoke signals of the Indians. 

He and Tauser ran beside the droves of cattle going 
West with the wagon train, he gathered nuts and berries 
while they lasted, and then helped to shovel the first snow 
that delayed the wagons sorely. It was day after day of 
lonely travel; first among trees a hundred feet high, the 
sky to be seen only above the forest. 

Then, when the hills and plains came, there was a view 
where the sight of a river was a line of light as well as 
of water. Presently the wagons had to be caulked and 
have huge logs tied to the wheels for fording the streams, 
and they saw many cow-men. Then came a wonderful 
day when the emigrant wagons from New England and 
the Conestogas from Pennsylvania camped beside a wide 
yellow river among the fertile plains of Missouri. 


90 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


‘‘Tanser,’’ said Benny, as the two slipped away from 
the village of wagons to go down for a look at the river, 
^‘you may see one of those new steamboats weVe heard 
told about back East/’ Then he grew pale, shouted back 
to the drivers, and wrung his hands at what he saw. 
There indeed was one of the fabled Mississippi steam¬ 
boats, awkward funnels, big paddle wheel, clumsy decks 
with staterooms and all, but she had swerved perhaps in 
the current, or struck a great log which had made a hole 
in her side. She was aground and sinking there in the 
Father of Waters, within call of land. 

Logs on wagon wheels were replaced as the camp 
awoke to action. Oxen were harnessed with the weary 
horses, whips cracked, wheels strained and creaked as 
the wagons rode out into the shallows of the river like 
lifeboats to the help of the sinking steamboat. The pas¬ 
sengers were lifted oif the slowly dropping decks; the 
cargo, where it was not too heavy, was transferred; and 
the wagons floated back to the friendly circle of their 
shore fires where there was food and dry clothing. 

Benny and Tauser stood on the bank to watch. Sud¬ 
denly the dog gave a quick bark, and swam out into the 
river toward what looked like a bundle of clothing fallen 
from the upper deck of the sinking steamboat. He 
gripped it in his mouth as Benny had taught him to grip 
a log thrown out into the mill stream at home. He swam 
steadily to the shore, holding the bundle well out of the 
water, and when some of the women and Benny met him, 
Tauser laid before them the small Clotilde. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 91 

She had lost her silk bonnet and her ermine muif. The 
net in which her cnrls had been held had loosened to 
release the clond of her dark hair, its curls circling about 
the ivory oval of her little face. But when Tauser kissed 
her cheeks with his wet tongue and Benny chafed one 
white hand until its fingers closed and held his, Clotilde 
opened her frightened brown eyes. She looked at the 
great circle of the wagons. 

^ ‘ They said a covered wagon would be here to take me 
to my father at Washington,^’ she said to the woman who 
held her close inside a gray wool shawl. 

‘‘I will take you back with me,” Benny told Clotilde 
proudly. ^‘My dog and I start East tomorrow.” 

So the wagons separated, the emigrants going on far¬ 
ther, beyond the Mississippi, until they reached the des¬ 
erts and the mountains. Some built new homes, some 
found gold, and some stopped by the way, martyrs to the 
cause of the opening of the West. The Conestogas, their 
loads increased from the river boats and the rescued pas¬ 
sengers, started back toward Pennsylvania, freighters of 
the new Republic, red, white and blue wagons whose 
wide wheel ruts cut a trail of national progress. 

Beside the horses of the first wagon ran Tauser, look¬ 
ing up and barking from time to time to where, beside 
the driver, sat a boy and a girl. The little girl wore a 
home-knitted muffler wound carefully about the white 
stem of her neck. The boy carried a blacksnake whip, 
snapping it proudly above the steadily jogging train. 


92 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The Ghost of Black Horse Inn 

It seemed anything bnt 
that, the ghostly Black 
Horse, to Lucy, whose 
father and mother owned 
the inn and provided lodg¬ 
ing and food for travelers 
and their horses of a hun¬ 
dred years ago. It stood 
in Salem, Massachusetts,on an old New England road. 

The sun shining down on the barns, the pigeon house, 
the hen houses and piggeries, to say nothing of the great 
square dining room of the house itself with its huge fire¬ 
place and rows of shining pewter cups and plates, made 
it seem the most cheerful place in the world to Lucy. 

Lucy Jencks was eleven years old, a clever little 
Yankee lass, who shelled peas and cut string beans and 
polished the pewter platters to help Perseverance Ab¬ 
bott who was the Black Horse kitchen maid. 

Such rye and Indian bread as Perseverance could mix 
and bake to just the right toothsomeness! She and Lucy 
were as busy as bees in and about the winter and sum¬ 
mer kitchens, the wash-room, the smoke house, the wood 
room, and the shed when the place was full of guests. 
Between times Lucy knit her own stockings and quilted. 
But sometimes she shivered when she thought of the 
ghost in the Indian Eoom. 

Mother Jencks would give no attention to the tales of 



BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 93 

the ghost, although everyone could recount the legends, 
and it was from this Indian specter that the Black Horse 
Inn had taken its name. When there were so many of 
the Jencks boys and girls that the house nearly over¬ 
flowed with them on a crowded night, mother Jencks had 
decided to take the Indian Eoom, the haunted room, for 
her own. 

A little open staircase in the corner of the great down¬ 
stairs living room led up to the haunted chamber. There 
a vast four-poster bedstead with curtains, valance, and 
tester of white dimity, had been set up by brave mother 
Jencks. At night a low trundle bed, tucked away under¬ 
neath the four-poster, was drawn out, and upon this slept 
Lucy and her three little sisters. 

On an old high-backed settle slept the baby, Eeuben, 
wrapped in soft quilts. Home bars at the front made this 
into a fine and safe bed for Eeuben. It did seem as if 
no ghost would dare to come into so snug and crowded a 
chamber as this, and the Indian had not been seen for 
a long time, although some of the sea-captains stopping 
at the Black Horse for the night told of having met him 
on the road. 

It was questioned, though, whether they had really 
seen him or had but fancied it. The Indians of that day 
were trying to dress like the village folk, but the ghost 
of the Black Horse, who was said to come to Lucy’s and 
the other children’s room, was a real, old-fashioned one. 

He came, rattling his chains and hatchet, from the 
direction of the storeroom just back of the chamber. 


94 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


This storeroom was a kind of loft, packed solidly with 
odds and ends; cast-off farm tools, broken furniture, 
boxes, barrels, every sort of old thing in a mixed-up 
mass, so that there was scant room for even Lucy to rum¬ 
mage. It would be a fine place for a ghost to hide. 

The ghost was said, when he had been seen, to have 
been dressed in the trappings of a war chief—^buckskin, 
turkey feathers, bears’ teeth and plenty of paint. And 
it was said that this Indian ghost always pointed to some 
spot where, if one dug deep and hard enough, a chest of 
treasure would be found. 

Those were strange old days. Some of the grown-ups 
were as prone to believe old stories like this as were the 
boys and girls. So visitors to the Black Horse, in spite 
of mother Jencks and her flock up there right under the 
nose of the ghost at night, believed in the Indian ghost 
and expected him whenever the stars were dimmed and 
a wild wind blew inland from the sea. 

More than anyone did Lucy expect him. While her 
mother slept peacefully, Lucy vrould sit up in bed in her 
ruffled nightcap and peer toward the swinging door of 
the storeroom. Because she was looking for him, the 
Indian appeared to her one night. 

There was a flutter of something colored at the door, 
then a long, shadow-like finger on the wall that seemed to 
lengthen and point outside toward a place in the garden 
which Lucy would always be able to remember. Of 
course, the fluttering color was the Indian ghost’s blan¬ 
ket; the shadow on the wall his hand and arm. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


95 


Lucy was rigid with fear and, when her nightcap was 
rudely torn off her head, it was time to do something. 
She got out of bed, softly so as not to awaken the other 
children. She crept down the stairs and out into the soft 
spring night, the Indian ^s hand pointing the way to her 
until it led her to the roots of their favorite Sapson apple- 
tree, that tree of juicy apples that the children loved so 
to eat in a rich dumpling. 

In the morning everyone laughed at Lucy. 

‘‘You had a dream and walked right out-of-doors in 
your sleep. It must have been because of that sausage 
you ate for supper,’^ Perseverance told Lucy. “Your 
father had to bring you into the house again. 

But, in spite of the fun Lucy caused, the neighbors 
began to believe that the Indian really had come again to 
the Black Horse; that he had told of.his treasure hidden 
under the Sapson apple-tree; and that there would be no 
peace for the house or the village until the chest was 
dug for. So father Jencks dug deep into the ground at 
the roots of the apple tree. 

They found not a thing. 

Then he dug around the cedar tree that stood near, 
and it killed the tree. The neighbors helped him to clean 
out the well back of the orchard to see if this might be 
the spot the ghost had indicated, but found nothing. 

Strange, and Lucy, who had begun to feel quite impor¬ 
tant on account of all the talk and excavating she had 
caused, began to think that she heard the ghost often at 
night after that. And she came to neglect her knitting 


96 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


and her patchwork sewing in order to creep np to the 
Indian Room and listen for footsteps of ghostly moc¬ 
casins. 

There were sounds from the storeroom at night. 
Mother Jencks could hear them and after a while she and 
the children moved, four-poster, trundle bed and all, to 
another chamber which was smaller but quieter. 

The sounds were like bones rattling. Everyone 
thought of the uneasiness of the Indian ghost, with his 
tribe and totem gone and his old customs and ways of 
living taken away from him by the white men. It was 
probably his skeleton rattling about up there in the store¬ 
room of the Black Horse, they said. 

New stories got about, having to do with rumors that 
the house had been built on the site of the Indian’s 
former lodge and that this Indian, who had been a chief, 
had been forced to wander along the seacoast homeless 
until his ghost returned to father Jencks’ tavern. 

It was observed that fewer guests stopped now for 
lodging and food at the Black Horse Inn. Those who 
were brave enough to spend a night there told of having 
heard plainly that strange rattling in the loft room. If 
the wind were high, the sound of the rattling of the 
ghost’s old bones could be heard downstairs by the circle 
of travelers who sat about the fireplace. 

^‘Well, Lucy,” Perseverance said one day, later in the 
year, ‘‘your father is giving up the Black Horse. He 
says he is going out to the West, going with a caravan 
that’s starting this summer to take up land and dig for 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


97 


gold. He says he doesn^t believe there’s any treasure in 
the world to be pointed out by any ghost. He’s going to 
dig for his own treasure.” 

Lucy looked up from the pan of peas she was shelling. 
‘Ht’s a good deal my fault, Persy,” she said, ‘‘because 
I dreamed about that Indian, and then I told things about 
him that I can’t be sure were quite true. I’d like to 
make up for it somehow.” 

Perseverance, not so very much older than Lucy, 
looked up with an odd smile from the pie crust she was 
rolling out. She wiped her floury arms on a homespun 
towel. “Your mother wants we should clear out the loft 
room a bit so she can begin getting ready to pack for 
going West,” she told Lucy. “It’s a fine day to get at it, 
with the wind blowing fresh for taking away the dust. 
Let’s you and me get at it! ” 

Lucy gasped. “Oh, my, Persy! I haven’t been inside 
that storeroom since the night when I saw the Indian’s 
blanket at the door. I wouldn’t dare!” 

“Well, you said you’d like to do something to make 
up for all the trouble you’ve made your pa and ma,” 
Perseverance said. “If you don’t dare, I do!” And she 
started toward the broom closet. 

“Oh, wait, Persy,” Lucy called. “I am sorry, and I 
will go up and help clean out the storeroom if you will 
stay with me all the time. ’ ’ 

So the two girls crept up the stairs, through the Indian 
Room, and cautiously opened the door of the loft room 
that was so full of stored odds and ends that they could 


98 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


hardly get in themselves. Mice scurried away at their 
approach. Spiders’ webs hung like thick veils in front 
of their eyes. The loft part of the storeroom lay at the 
extreme back, and the two girls pushed their way over 
toward it where a short ladder led up into the loft. 

There was a sudden gust of wind, a low rattling sound! 
It was the rattling that everyone knew must be that of 
the Indian’s restless bones. Lucy screamed, but Perse¬ 
verance w'ent right on. 

They climbed the ladder, Lucy trying to be brave, and 
they flung open the single dusty shutter that was the only 
way a ray of light could penetrate into the loft. It was a 
crowded, desolate place, but there, right in front of them, 
between empty kegs and firkins and bandboxes, lay a 
long, narrow metal box. It was quite long enough to 
hold the ghost’s bones and when the wind shook the chim¬ 
ney outside and the walls as well, the box moved and its 
contents rattled. 

‘‘Do we dare open it, Persy?” whispered Lucy. 

“I dare, if you promise not to run away!” the brave 
Perseverance told her. 

So they lifted down the mysterious box with its cloud 
of dust that almost blinded them. It was bound about 
with a worn rope, but they untied this with trembling 
fingers and lifted otf the top, hoping that they would find 
it empty. 

But no, there was no such good fortune for the ghost 
hunters as this. The opened box disclosed to them some¬ 
thing wrapped in old linen bands and strips of flannel, 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


99 



When they touched it, a faint rattle was heard 


as an ancient mummy is wrapped. When they touched 
it, a faint rattle was heard. And the wrappings fell away 
as the girls poked them, to show a bare, shining scalp 
as if the poor Indian had, himself, been made to feel the 
tomahawk. There was not a hair left on the head. 

Perseverance laughed. She chuckled and giggled until 
mother and father Jencks came running to see what was 
the joke, followed by all the little Jenckses. 

''It's grandfather's wig block!" said father Jencks, 
"and here's his curling iron and his wire wig-springs. 
In the days before my time, grandfather used to curl the 






















































100 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


wigs of the guests who stopped here at the Black Horse, 
and he made fine headdresses, too, if need be. I Ve heard 
that he curled the wigs of the officers after the Battle of 
Lexington. No wonder this sounded like a haunted tav¬ 
ern with the wind blowing this old wig block and the 
wires against each other 

So that was the finish of the ghost. The Jencks family 
went West and did some really worth while digging in 
that new soil, and Lucy never forgot her courage in try¬ 
ing to discover the Indian in the loft room. Her dream, 
the fluttering of a bright Paisley shawl hung up on the 
door, the village stories that were told and retold until 
they seemed true, and the finding of the wig block that 
grandfather Jencks had so safely stored away, are all 
told in old papers that never found their way into the 
school history books, but which are history just the same. 

For what is history for boys and girls but the courage 
to overcome and the pluck to face fear in order that the 
truth may triumph! 

So, too, do the records of the old inns of New England 
make history, for homes were far apart at that period 
and the spirit of hospitality for which the Colonial inn 
stood had a great deal to do with the development of our 
country. 

Travel was mainly a matter of riding horseback or 
taking long, slow trips by stage-coach. Fancy the com¬ 
fort and delight to the tired schoolmaster, preacher. 
Colonial official, or the stranger within our borders, to 
see the light of a welcoming gate lantern marking the 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


101 


road ahead of him to a warm, cheerful roadhouse. How 
good the roasting goose and the baking loaves must have 
smelled to hungry travelers. 

There were children, often little girls like Lucy Jencks, 
who helped with the housework of the old taverns; mak¬ 
ing beds, scouring pewter, trimming lantern wicks, and 
waiting on tables, in starched calico and with smoothly 
braided locks and smiling faces. There were small boys 
who ran to meet the stage-coach, to hold the horses until 
they could be put into the big stable; to bring water from 
the yard pump and to pull down fodder for the famished 
beasts and then blanket them carefully for a cold night. 

And who were the guests of these old inns; of these 
houses of welcome along New England roads that were at 
one time called Ordinaries, because they stood for shelter 
and food for anybody, day or night, summer or winter? 

About Boston, the old inns were the original business 
exchanges. They were counting houses, exchange offices, 
shipping marts, reading rooms and banks. In the Salem 
Ordinaries there could be found groups of the ‘‘down- 
Easters,’’ captains of the old sailing vessels and the 
swift clippers. Seated about a table loaded with meats 
and home-grown vegetables and corn bread and pud¬ 
dings, they were chalking down, on the spaces of the bare 
boards between the pewter platters, the prevailing prices 
of lumber, bark, tea and spices. 

General Washington paid so many visits to the Co¬ 
lonial inns that his trips through the Colonies before and 
after the Kevolution were marked by a series of sign- 


102 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


boards swinging in front of old inn doors in his honor. 
Davy Crockett, stately Henry Clay, Taylor, Polk, and 
Harrison stopped at the inns of the old National road of 
the South. Daniel Webster, that giant among men, was 
the guest of honor in the inns of the North. John Adams 
tells us of the good folk who presided at the Ipswich Inn. 

^‘Landlord and landlady are of the grandest people 
alive. The landlady is the great-granddaughter of Gov¬ 
ernor Endicott, and has all the notions of good family life 
that you find in the Winslows, the Quincys, Saltonstalls, 
Chandlers and Otises, or, as you might say with more 
propriety, in the Winthrops. 

‘‘As to the landlord, he has the manner and bearing of 
a nobleman of England; always calm, cheerful, good-na¬ 
tured. And the contemplation of his farm, his sons, his 
house, pastures, and cattle, his sound judgment as he 
thinks, and his great holiness as well as that of his wife, 
keep him as erect in his thoughts as a noble or a prince.” 

Benjamin Franklin’s home became an inn. What 
would boys and girls of today do without the tales Long¬ 
fellow put into the setting of “The Wayside Inn?” 

Part and substance of these historic Ordinaries, which 
represented the spirit of welcome without which no 
nation can become truly great, are the stories of the chil¬ 
dren whose willing service helped to keep their doors 
open, the lights in their windows beacons along the roads. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


103 


An Adventure 

The crackling of a 
frosted twig made 
the boy start. He 
had come to a lonely 
pass through the 
foothills of New 
Hamp shire, and 
there was not an¬ 
other human being 
to be seen or heard 
anywhere about. 

In the early morning of that day when he had started 
out from his father ^s tannery, the world had looked 
bright to Marshall. He had put on his buffalo-lined* 
great-coat and strapped on his leather moccasins in high 
spirts, for he had made up his mind to try and find ad¬ 
venture. 

This boy of the olden times of our country had a great 
desire to see the world, to visit foreign places, to discover 
what lay behind the great mountains of his state. And 
he was tired of being a tanner’s apprentice. 

Tanning leather for the few pairs of stout shoes which 
the boys and girls wore in those days, and for the stouter 
uses of harnesses, wasn’t any too pleasant a job. Mar¬ 
shall’s father was a tanner, and well skilled in the art of 
taking the tough skins of deer, cattle, sheep or goats and 


The Boy Who Wanted 



Found the footprints of hears 



104 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


softening them and treating them for months at a time 
in his various concoctions. 

A tanner had the appearance of some genie from a 
fairy tale as he mixed his clay, oil, or clabber, and then 
brewed the stuff, and after that smoked out the skins. 
Nutgalls and leaves were beginning to be used, but New 
England was still far behind her mother countries across 
the sea in the method of tanning leather. , 

There were said to be almost magic methods by which 
a skin could be softened, and even dyed, until it became 
fit for the slipper of a princess, or the high, polished boot 
of a cavalier. But New England did not know how to do 
this fine tanning. 

Marshall had an idea that he might get to Europe on 
this runaway trip of his. That had been his dream when 
he had started out, a bit of bread and cheese tied in a red 
handkerchief and slung over his shoulder on the end of a 
walking stick he had cut from a stout hazel tree. 

But the truth of the matter was that Marshall felt just 
exactly as a great many boys of today feel. He was tired 
of hard work, and he wanted to have an adventure. He 
was only twelve years old, and he had worked at curing 
and tanning skins since he had been big enough to hold 
a paddle. 

But he had forgotten to take a compass with him on 
this trip he was taking. Instead of being on his way east, 
toward the sea front, where he hoped to find a seacoast 
town and stow himself away in some clipper ship bound 
for foreign ports, Marshall was going straight west. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 105 

And he had come to mountain roads, leading him con¬ 
tinually higher and farther into the wilderness. He had 
found the footprints of bears in the light snow of the 
trail and, worse yet, he had just found the fresh marks 
of moccasins, larger than his. 

<< There are Algonquins who still come down here to 
New Hampshire from Canada,’’ Marshall told himself, 
‘Hor hunting silver fox and bear and getting deerskins 
to sell in the Provinces. I am only one boy, alone, and 
if this is an Indian in the trail ahead of me, why I shall 
have no chance at all.” 

He had a desire to turn back, but he was a plucky lad. 
He thought of his hazel stick. Perhaps that would pro¬ 
tect him against a marauding Algonquin. So Marshall 
pressed on, the trail becoming dimmer and more indis¬ 
tinguishable, because of the shadows of the mountains, 
at every step. 

At last Marshall struck a light with the flint and tinder 
he had brought in his breeches’ pocket, and lighted a 
pine knot for a torch. The flickering light showed him 
the prints of many moccasins in the wood just ahead of 
him. 

And, to increase his terror, he could hear low moans, 
as of someone in great pain, where the pine trees ahead 
cut him off from the pass he was following. 

''Two bands of Indian hunters, likely,” the boy thought. 
"They have met and one of the bands has had a fight 
with the other to get the skins. And a wounded Indian 
hunter is left here to die, perhaps. But what can I do to 


106 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

help him, and suppose the others hear me and take me 
prisoner 

It was a hard situation for a boy. But Marshall had 
heard of the Good Samaritan in the home meeting-house 
ever since he could remember anything, and had looked 
at his picture in the big family Bible at home. Here, he 
knew, was his chance to be a Samaritan himself, although 
his teeth chattered with fear, and it took every ounce of 
courage he had to press on into the unexplored woods 
from which came that weak moaning. 

On he went, the moaning coming closer all the time. A 
short way along the path, a turn into a sheltered grove 
of great pine trees, and Marshall came upon a bundle 
of clothes huddled on the ground that he thought might 
be a wounded Indian. The man wore fur moccasins, 
buckskin breeches, a duffle coat and a buffalo cloak with 
a hood over which was worn a cap of bearskin. Beside 
him lay a bundle wrapped in leather. 

‘‘Left by the wayside!’’ Marshall repeated to himself 
as he timidly poked the man, still cautiously looking 
from right to left to see if he were in danger from 
ambushed Indians. But the woods were still and cold, 
and the man suddenly sat up. Why, he was white and 
an old man, bent with his years of toil and the long jour¬ 
neys on foot that he had taken through New England. 
The first thing he did was to feel for his bundle, open it, 
and then exclaim because the tools inside it were safe. 

“The rascal!” he said, trying to stand up. “He 
wanted my territory and, being young and spryer than I 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


107 


am, he knocked me down and left me here. I had an 
idea he had stolen my tools but I gave him a blow before 
I fell that scared him off, I fancy. ’ ’ 

‘‘A Crispin!’’ Marshall exclaimed. ‘‘Our village has 
been waiting for you. Father Crispin, all this season. 
Not a boy or girl but needs shoes! Are you hurt?” 

“Mainly hungry, lad,” the Crispin said as he stumbled 
to his feet now, holding himself by the boy’s shoulder 
and eating like a hungry dog the bread and cheese Mar¬ 
shall pressed upon him. 

“Who knocked you down. Father?” he asked. 

“A young whipper-snapper of a Crispin,” said the old 
man, “who had a mind to lame me so I couldn’t get to 
a village. He wanted my trade, but I ’ll show him there’s 
life in my old bones yet.” He counted over his tools. 

Yes, they were all there; the large and small awls, 
the stout needles, the wax, the strong thread, the fat little 
hammers for pegging soles to uppers—all the kit of a 
Crispin, who was the only shoemaker of our long-ago 
days, a faithful craftsman who traveled from one village 
to another making the families’ footwear for the year. 

Marshall knew the ways of the Crispins. Shoemaking 
at that time was looked upon as a very honorable craft, 
and there was great rivalry among the Crispins. They 
were boarded in one family at a time in the villages 
where they worked, having special pies and doughnuts, 
and puddings made with an extra amount of molasses 
in the Indian meal, provided for their enjoyment. 

To have a Crispin at one’s house for a week or two 


108 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


meant that the father would have a stout pair of cow¬ 
hide boots, and the mother a pair of kid ones for wearing 
to the meeting-house on Sunday. There would be two 
pairs of calfskin shoes for the two girls, and two pairs 
of ingrain leather boots for the boys would be cut, 
stitched and pegged. The Crispin was always an honest, 
faithful worker; slow, but his footwear would last two 
years, with care. 

But there was warfare among them on the trail. One 
Crispin meeting another thought it fair play to knock 
out his rival and take over that rival’s village if he could 
reach it first. 

^‘What are you doing here in this lonely spotT’ the 
old man asked Marshall, after he had eaten and bound 
his tools to his back once more. 

Hanging his head, Marshall told him. am running 
away, Father Crispin,’’ he said. 

‘‘Haven’t you a good home, lad!” the Crispin asked. 

Marshall told him about the tanning business at which 
he was his father’s apprentice. “But I want to see for¬ 
eign parts,” he went on, “I am tired of my trade.” 

“Well, that’s a natural wish,” the Crispin said, taking 
out his compass and starting, leaning on Marshall’s 
stick, toward the boy’s village. “I come from foreign 
places, and I can tell you that a boy who wants to travel 
will, when his good time comes. But you lead me to 
your home, and I will give your father the first chance 
at my shoemaking this season. 

“And lad, if you will promise me to stick to your 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


109 



Crispm using his stick and leaning on the boy*s shoulder 


apprenticeship at the leather business, I will tell you a 
secret. I know a little village in Russia where they have 
the secret for curing leather that a king would give his 
crown to learn. It is far away, but you can go there 
when you are a man, and I warrant you will be the first 
to learn the marvel of making Russia leather. 

‘‘As soft as a baby’s cheek, it comes out, and the colors 
are those of the silks the Chinese dye. That leather can 
be used for belts and bags for fine ladies, and for travel¬ 
ing bags in place of the carpet bags w^e use here in New 
England. I am too old to take this trip to Russia, but I 
know the name of the village where the secret is held, 
and I am grateful to you for coming to my help.” 

Marshall was thrilled. Hungry, tired, cold, he lighted 










110 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


a fresh pine knot and they pushed toward home, the Cris¬ 
pin using his stick and leaning on the boy’s shoulder. 
They had to spend the night in a sheltered cave but, in 
front of a crackling fire, the boy forgot his weariness in 
the tales the Crispin told him and he promised solemnly 
not to leave his father or his work until he was old 
enough. 

It might have gone hard with Marshall if he had come 
home from his trip alone—but bringing in a Crispin! 
Why, the whole village turned out to escort him and the 
shoemaker to the Marshall house and, in the excitement 
of finding a bench for the Crispin and setting him up in 
the corner of the big kitchen, nobody scolded Marshall. 

Soon there came the smell of the Crispin’s fresh-cut 
leather uppers and the cheerful tap-tap-tap of his ham¬ 
mer pegging on the thick soles. During the noon hour 
the village children came to peer in at the kitchen win¬ 
dow and the door, to have a word with Crispin, or to look 
enviously at the shoes standing proudly on his bench. 

Such heels and soles and uppers had never been seen 
in the village before. But Marshall was not there. No, 
indeed; he and Father Crispin had a secret. Marshall 
was busy at the tanning vats, but when he was old 
enough, when he had served his apprenticeship at his 
trade, he was going on a trip to foreign parts. Until 
then, he would keep the Crispin’s secret! 

It doesn’t always happen that one’s dreams come true. 
But one way of helping along a dream is to keep it in 
the back of one’s mind while doing one’s daily work; 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 111 

never forgetting it, but just letting the dream grow and 
ripen like a sweet apple in the sunshine of an orchard. 

That was what Marshall Jewell did. He was a tan¬ 
ner's apprentice, learning all he could about leather in 
old New England. Then he and his father carried on a 
fine business in Hartford, making leather belting for the 
new machinery being used for manufacturing all sorts of 
clothing and tools. Presently, his dream came true. 

Hartford, the capital city of Connecticut at this time, 
the early part of the nineteenth century, was a place of 
diligence and busy manufacturing. Yankee inventions 
were being found valuable all over our country and Con¬ 
necticut was a center for the making of those important 
small things which every home needed. 

Carpets and the thread for sewing them and the tacks 
for laying them, horseshoes, clocks, linen twine for fish 
nets, bells, locks, pins, needles, even bicycles—all these 
industries centered in and around Hartford. Each 
needed its own kind of machine and when Pliny Jewell 
and his sons, foremost among which was Marshall, came 
to Hartford they brought with them a useful idea; that 
of making heavy leather belting, by means of which the 
wheels of Connecticut's humming machinery could be 
run instead of by the former and very clumsy method of 
gearing that had been in use. 

They prospered, being third among the tanners in 
America, and they found themselves educating, not only 
American manufacturers in the use of leather belting, 
but European firms as well. Marshall Jewell became a 


112 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

most respected member of the commonwealth. He was 
elected governor of Connecticut three times. 

For many years, but particularly since the independ¬ 
ence of the states had been established, we had found 
that it was a good thing to send men we could trust as 
ministers to foreign countries. They were something 
like our nation’s interpreters, helping the kings and 
queens of the old world kingdoms to understand our new 
language of freedom. 

Shipping, cotton, tea, laws—even Connecticut nut¬ 
megs, pins and tacks—^had to be explained to England, 
France, Kussia and Spain. Benjamin Franklin was one 
of our first foreign ministers. Marshall Jewell, the boy 
from the New Hampshire tannery, was a later one. He 
was sent to Russia to represent our country. His dream 
of an adventure thus came true. 

With the memory of the Crispin’s secret, he learned 
and brought back to our country the method of making 
Russia leather which has been such a service to us. 

It was a simple process, like all great inventions. The 
leather was steeped in a mixture prepared from oak and 
hemlock bark, sumach, willow bark and water. In this 
the leather was boiled and saturated until it was as soft 
as the moss of the woods and the color of the bark of the 
forest. Then it was removed from the mixture and 
smeared with a solution of birch bark and oil. 

But it made more beautiful and more useful leather 
than we had ever been able to tan; more pliable and fitted 
for many more objects. And it was worth waiting for. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


113 


The Leather Stocking Boy 

His name was Jimmy Cooper, and he lived in the big 
Fenimore house in the village of Otsego. There was a 
large family of the Cooper boys and girls. The stone 
house was built with wings at either end to hold them, 
together with the workers who took care of the wide 
acres of Mr. Cooper’s farm. 

But the house did not see Jimmy very much except 
when he was hungry, or when night settled down on 
Cherry Valley and the forest on top of Apple Hill, which 
overlooked the lake, seemed peopled in the dark with 
the ghosts of the Indians who used to trail there. 

Jimmy had a pair of leather stockings; smaller, but 
just as useful for tramping and exploring the country 
’round about the village as those of his friend and guide, 
Mr. Shipman. Wearing his stout leggins, the older 
scout, ‘‘Shipman,” fished and hunted in the vicinity, 
always ready to provide a mess of fresh bass or salmon 
trout or a venison steak for a hunt supper in the village. 
Whenever he had the chance Jimmy Cooper, his fish rod 
and his musket with him, went too. 

Any boy would have been thrilled by the country there 
in central New York State, on Lake Otsego and along 
the shores of the Susquehanna Eiver in the year 1801. 

Jimmy knew a rock near the outlet of the lake, and 
could paddle out to it easily, that had been a rendezvous 


114 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


for savages not so many years before; painted, cruel red 
men who came down from the surrounding mountains to 
trade furs with the few white men of the region and 
were as ready to kill them as to make a bargain. 

Standing straight as an arrow on this rock, the boy 
could see the road from the south along which his father 
and mother had journeyed to the village from Philadel¬ 
phia in a chaise as early settlers, arriving on the shore 
in a canoe, the chaise left in the forest until a flatboat 
later ferried it over to their first log dwelling. 

He could see the stump of what all of Otsego knew as 
the Bridge Tree on the shore, a huge pine tree that the 
oldest inhabitant had cut down and used for a bridge 
across the stream which gave outlet to the lake. It was 
hazardous crossing a river on a log. 

Jimmy Cooper was proud of his father whenever he 
looked at the Bridge Tree; at the safe little village 
nestling among the hills where Indians had burned and 
scalped and plundered so recently; at the turnpike road 
which led to the Mohawk Valley and as far as Albany by 
means of a big coach and four horses; at the flatboat 
which ran across the lake, called, in friendly fun, the 
‘^Ship Jay’’ and commanded by old ‘‘Admiral Hear¬ 
say;” and at the old iron swivel which stood on the 
village green. 

General Washington had made a visit to Otsego, and 
the swivel, which Jimmy himself and some of the other 
boys had found in the Cooper cellar, had been left there 
during the Revolutionary war. It was now a peaceful 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


115 


bit of artillery, fired only on Independence Day, but a 
village relic of which to be proud. 

Last of all, if we can, picture the leather stocking lad 
of twelve returning home with the scout, Mr. , Shipman, 
from a fishing trip. He would feel the hidden stories 
and the wild dangers which the surrounding country held 
in the hearts of its great 
and ancient trees. 

There was a rise of 
ground opposite the vil¬ 
lage called The Vision. 

‘‘Those black hills, 
old Leather Stocking 
would tell young Leather 
Stocking, “are a thou¬ 
sand feet above the lake. 

And the lake has deep 
spots that nobody has 
ever been able to sound. But I know of places in it where 
a ship of good size could float herself, her yards in the 
forests, since it’s deep so close to the shore. There’s 
plenty of fish beside the trout and the bass, too, Jimmy; 
eels and pickerel and catfish. There are bears yet on 
Apple Hill!” 

Listening to the tales, which were as true as they were 
thrilling, Jimmy shivered with the crackling of a twig. 
A falling red leaf was, for the moment, the disappearing 
feather of the last of the Mohican Indians driven from 
Lake Otsego by the coming of the white man’s canoe. If 









116 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


they had not jnst then reached the edges of the village 
and seen the lamps from parlor windows spreading a 
comforting path of brightness along the elm-lined lanes, 
Jimmy might have been truly scared. 

He bade the scout good-bye and went on by himself. 
He stopped a moment to peer in through the windows 
of Mr. Phinney^s printing shop to watch him running the 
hand press, his apron stiff with ink and a quill pen stuck 
over one ear. 

All the village took pride in Mr. Phinney’s printing 
establishment. He had help in the daytime, and used 
many reams of paper every year in printing Bibles and 
almanacs, but he worked alone evenings in his shop. 
Otherwise, he never would have been able to accomplish 
all he did. 

It was said that Mr. Phinney had set himself a quota 
of eight thousand Bibles and two hundred thousand al¬ 
manacs to be printed every year. He was also printing 
Mr. Webster’s spelling book and some toy-books for the 
children. Picture books for boys and girls! Jimmy felt 
excited as he thought of this. He had another thought, 
too. 

‘Ht would be fine to be able to write a book,” he said 
to himself, ‘‘a book that could be printed and”—here the 
leather stocking boy’s fancy quite ran away with him— 
^Hhat could be sent across the ocean to London and sold 
there on the bookstalls!” 

Jimmy had heard all about England, because his great¬ 
grandfather had come to America from Stratford-on- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 117 

Avon, Mr. Will Shakespeare's town. But the thought of 
an American book going back to England—that was a 
dream. The boy hurried on. 

He was just about to turn in at the wide front door of 
the Coopers' house when he was startled into attention. 
The lamplight streaming through the fan-shaped window 
above the door showed him a strange figure half hiding 
in the shadows of the porch. 

The man had a scarlet handkerchief tied about his 
head instead of a cap, and he was dressed in a sailor's 
jacket and breeches with neither neck cloth nor stockings. 
He carried a dirk at his side, but when the door was 
opened he seemed a well-spoken, well-meaning stranger. 
As Jimmy slipped in through the door behind him, and 
listened to the talk the sailor had with his father in the 
library, he had a feeling that he was living a sea story 
come true. 

^‘Escaped the block only by the death of Eobespierre 
in France," the sailor explained. Speak six living lan¬ 
guages and have sailed every sea that knows the ships 
of France. Free-booter, trader, pirate when need be. 
Name? Esaias Hausman. Business!" Here the sailor 
pulled from his pocket a bag whose stout string he untied 
emptying its contents in a clinking, golden pile on Mr. 
Cooper's desk. Gold coins! Solid, yellow gold! Jim¬ 
my's eyes nearly closed with their dazzling splendor. 

“1 want to settle dovm," Esaias Hausman, citizen of 
the world, told Jimmy's father. have walked bare¬ 
footed, stopping the night, when I could, in a barn or 


118 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


sleeping in the forest, all the way here from Boston. I 
like this country and I’m told that you have more land 
than you need. Sell me a little land close to the lake. I 
want to build myself a cabin and settle down here. I 
can pay you in gold whatever it’s worth. ’ ’ 

So Esaias Hausman came to Otsego to live, took up 
land, and built a comfortable enough frame house on a 
meadow of Mr. Cooper’s land. Jimmy found his cup of 
adventure full with this retired pirate so near, always 
ready to tell him stories of the sea, of good fights, and 
of the blood-filled streets of Paris during the reign of 
terror in the French Kevolution. 

In return, the Leather Stocking boy led Hausman 
along the lake and river trails outside of the village, and 
showed him the hatchet marks of the Indians on the old 
trees. He sat with him beside camp fires, over which 
they broiled the fish they had caught, as they listened 
for wild-cat calls from the mountains above. 

There was a strange thing about this man, though, who 
had been almost everything a boy is interested in, from 
a wanderer to a spy, from a common seaman to a pirate. 

Sometimes, when Jimmy went down to his house on 
the shore, it would be empty. For days there would be 
no one in Esaias Hausman’s shack save the squirrels or 
a caucus of noisy crows gathered on the empty threshold. 
He was overpowered by the spirit of the hills, and wan¬ 
dered as far as The Vision beyond the water, where he 
seemed to have fellowship with wild animals or the 
spirits of the Indians, Hawk-Eye and Chingachgook. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


119 


l/T 



Emptying its contents in a clinking, golden pile 


Or he followed the trails of the deer slayers and path¬ 
finders of the days before there was a village on the 
shore of Lake Otsego. Then he would return, a better 
pal than before, the Leather Stocking boy thought, for 
this time spent with the ghosts of the first Americans. 

Jimmy Cooper did not stay twelve years old. He grew 
up fast, and the little village of Otsego grew also, becom¬ 
ing Cooperstown. The boy was now James Fenimore 
Cooper, who went to Albany to school and later to Yale 







120 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

College, but left because he wanted more than anything 
else to go to sea. He shipped as a common sailor and 
lived over again some of the adventures of his friend 
Esaias Hausman. And v^ry soon after that, indeed 
while this James Fenimore Cooper was still a very young 
man, something unexpected happened in London. 

London loved books. Along its lanes and streets there 
stood many small wooden stalls upon which were dis¬ 
played old and new books, serious and gay ones, books 
of stories and books of travel and history. There were 
many small bookshops, their shelves lined with books, 
and suddenly upon the London bookstalls and upon the 
shelves of the shops there appeared a new book in a 
binding of yellow leather. 

It was a kind of book which England had never read 
before and at once everybody was reading it; at first 
with amusement. ‘‘Fancy an American being able to 
write a book! ’ ’ they said. And then they read this book, 
which was named The Spy, with great interest. “It is 
an American book!’’ England said. “It is full of the 
spirit of the new world. This James Fenimore Cooper 
knows the woods and Indians, scouts, spies, and courage.” 

Following this book. The Spy, came another as 
thrilling. While The Spy had helped boys and girls 
of England to feel the spirit of the American Hevolu- 
tion, the next of the Leather Stocking Tales, as James 
Fenimore Cooper called his books in their yellow leather 
covers. The Pioneer, was about the dangers and adven¬ 
ture of settling in a new country. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


121 


The Pilot, which followed The Pioneer, had the spirit 
of the sea in it, as the boy, Jimmy Cooper, had learned 
it first from the village pirate and then from his own 
experience behind the yards. Then Deerslayer came, the 
story of the old Otsego scout, Mr. Shipman, who had 
taught Jimmy to fish and shoot. The Last of the Mohi¬ 
cans, which soon found its way to hundreds of libraries 
in Europe, held between its covers the good and bad 
Indians who had peopled the woods and hills. 

History is told in many ways. It happened that, just 
at this time, when we were at peace comparatively, 
settled in homes and manufacturing tools and raising 
food enough so that 
there was little to worry 
about in America, some 
boys and girls were 
born who loved their 
country so much that they 
wanted to put her story 
between book covers. Mr. 

Phinney of Cooperstown 
and many other early 
printers were ready to 
make books. These boys 
and girls wanted to tell 
other lands through 
American - written story 
books what a great land 

if J‘dimes Fenimore Cooper 



122 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


There was a boy born of sea-faring men, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne of Salem, Massachusetts, who had a great 
wish, as had Jimmy Cooper, to write a book that would 
be read in England. The children to-day can find no 
books more interesting than Hawthorne’s Wonder Book 
and the Marble Faun, his Mosses from an Old Manse 
and The Snow Image. Most of all, Mr. Hawthorne 
wanted to make an American mountain live in a story, 
and you know how he did this in his story of The Great 
Stone Face. 

A Massachusetts boy, John Whittier, was pegging 
shoes to earn money for his schooling, and when he 
learned how to read and write he gave the world across 
the ocean Snowbound, that it might visit a real New 
England farmhouse in the winter time. He showed them 
a real American boy when he wrote the Barefoot Boy. 

Louisa Alcott lived and played and worked with her 
loved family at Concord, and then wrote Little Women 
about an American home. 

Mr. Longfellow decided that the childhood of an 
American Indian would make a beautiful story-poem, so 
he wrote Hiawatha, and he gave the world American 
history in a most interesting way in The Courtship of 
Miles Standish and the Tales of a Wayside Inn. 

James Bussell Lowell, when he was only seven years 
old, began to watch our birds and flowers, feeling, we 
must be sure, the beauties of America out-of-doors which 
he wrote in his poems later. 

Mr. Thoreau, living like a hermit among New England 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 123 

woods and streams, made even the forest paths speak 
to ns in a beantifnl language. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the story of Uncle Tom^s 
Cabin. 

But there was not a single boy or girl of these who 
put quite the spirit of American adventure into an 
American book at this time that the Leather Stocking 
boy, Jimmy Cooper, did. Sailors, scouts, Indian chief¬ 
tains, spies. Long Tom Coffin, Harvey Birch—all the 
glorious company of a boy’s trail through the early days 
of our country—live in the Leather Stocking Tales, which 
do more than write the spirit of our early literature. 
They inspire us of to-day to try to make history our¬ 
selves through imitating our ancestors’ courage and 
daring. 


124 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


Boy Life In A. Massachusetts Town 

When I was between the ages of nine and fourteen my 
parents, who then lived in a distant town, very wisely 
permitted me to spend most of the schoolless part of 
these five years with a large family on a farm in Ash- 
field in Massachusetts. Although this joyous period 
ended in 1860 , the life, industries and dress were very 
old-fashioned for that date and were proudly kept so. 

It was the best environment for a boy ever realized 
in history. 

I begin with winter, when men^s industries were 
largely in wood. Trees were chopped down and cut by 
two men working with a cross-cut saw. Sometimes the 
fallen trees were cut into logs, snaked together and piled, 
with the aid of cant-hooks, to be drawn across the frozen 
pond to the sawmill for some contemplated building; or, 
if of spruce, of straight grain and few knots, they were 
cut into cross-sections fifteen inches long, which was the 
legal length for shingles. 

These split logs were taken home in a pung, split with 
a beetle and wedge and then finished off on a shaving- 
horse, itself home-made. The shavings were in prime 
demand for kindling fires. 

Ax-helves, too, were sawed, split, hewn, whittled and 
scraped into shape with bits of broken glass. Butter- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


125 


paddles were commonly made of red cherry, while sugar 
lap-paddles were made by merely barking whistle-wood 
or bass, and whittling down one end for a handle. 

There were salt mortars and pig-troughs made from 
solid logs, with tools hardly more effective than those 
the Indian used for his dugout. Flails for next yearns 
threshing; cheese - hoops and cheese - ladders; bread - 
troughs and yokes for hogs and sheep; pokes for jump¬ 
ing cattle, horses and unruly geese; and stanchions for 
cows. 

Some took this season for cutting next year’s bean and 
hop poles, pea bush, and sled stakes, with an eye always 
out for a straight clean whipstock or fishing pole. 
Eepairs were made during this season and we made a 
new cat-hole once, beside the door, with a drop-lid which 
the cat operated with 
ease. New handles for 
shovels, pitchforks, 
spades, hoes and rakes 
were made in the win¬ 
ter. Scythes and brooms 
were homemade. 

Nearly all these forms 
of domestic wood work I 
saw and even helped 
with, or imitated them 
in play as a boy of ten 
might. I even became 

an expert, as compared Trees were chopped down 











126 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


with other hoys, in making elderwood pop-gnns, hemlock 
hows and arrows; or cross-hows with arrow-heads run 
on with melted lead, for which every scrap of lead pipe 
or antique pewter dish was in great demand. 

We hoys made weather vanes in the form of fish, 
roosters, or even ships; and an actual sawmill that 
turned in the hrook. How much this has served me 
in later life it would he hard to estimate. * 

The home industry in woolens was an important one. 
Sheep, as I remember, could thrive on the poorest hay 
or oats; the leavings of the neat cattle. In summer they 
could eat brakes, if not even hardback and tansy, and 
they would browse down berry briers and underbrush 
while their teeth cut the grass so close that cows could 
hardly survive in the same pasture with them. 

The spring lambs were raised in the shed, by hand; 
sometimes by the children, who earned their first spend¬ 
ing money that way. Sheep washing was a gala day and 
shearing, which came a week later, was hardly less in¬ 
teresting. 

A good shearer, who had done his twenty-five head a 
day, earned good wages—seventy-five cents or a dollar a 
day. 

Fleeces for home use were looked over, all burrs picked 
out, and they were then oiled with poor lard. ‘‘Bees’’ 
were often held to do this. There were carders in every 
town, but the implements were in each family; some 
members of which could not only card, but could even 
use the fine, long-toothed worsted combs in an emergency. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


127 


The rolls were spun at home; the children doing the 
woof or filling, and the older girls the warp, which must 
he better. The yarn, doubled if for stockings, after be¬ 
ing washed clean, next went to the great dye-tub in the 
chimney corner. Butternut bark for every-day suits, 
indigo for Sunday suits, and madder for shirting was the 
rule. There was also 
fancy dyeing, braiding 
and binding tightly or 
twisting in white thread 
to get a pepper-and-salt 
effect for loom patterns 
in girls’ dresses. 

Next, the filling was 
quilled for the shuttle 
and the warp spooled 
for the warping bars, 
both of these often 
homemade. Sometimes blue-and-white frock cloth was 
woven, sometimes kerseys and plaid dress patterns of 
many colors, or woolen sheets and even woolen pillow¬ 
cases. 

Knitting was easy, pretty visiting work. Girls earned 
from two to three York shillings a pair for men’s socks, 
paid in trade from the village store which gave out 
knitting if desired. Shag mittens were knit from left¬ 
over ends of warp. Scarfs were done with large wooden 
needles, and men’s gloves, tidies, and clocked stockings 
with ornamental open-work in the sides, were knit with 



Knitting was easy^ pretty 
visiting work 







128 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


one hook. This work kept the girls busy evenings. 

The children, when they were young, were left very 
much to themselves and they were at home in every 
house, barn, or shed, within a mile or more. 

There was, of course, coasting, skating, swimming, 
fox-and-hounds, with snowballing and choosing of sides 
and elaborate forts that lasted for a whole school term. 
In the family as we gathered about the stove, or some¬ 
times about the grand old fireplace in the back kitchen, 
with its back-log, crane, pothooks and trammels, we told 
stories of the old fort, of bears, wild cats, Indians and 
Bloody Brook. 

Some of us could sing old English ballads that had 
come down in our families and which had never been in 
print in America. Lord Love, Irving, Bunyon and The 
Youths’ Companion were read aloud. 

A pair of skates was earned by a boy friend one win¬ 
ter, by reading the entire Bible through, and another 
bought himself an accordion with money he earned by 
braiding the plain sides of palm-leaf hats, where no 
splicing was needed, at a cent per side. 

All families allowed the game of fox and geese; a few 
permitted checkers. There were beech and chestnutting 
parties, barn raisings, and days set apart for all the men 
in the district being warned out by the surveyor to gather 
and work on the roads with teams. 

There were huskings, with cider and pumpkin pie, and 
games on the barn floor when it was cleared of corn; 
apple-paring bees, with bobbing, swinging a whole par- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


129 



ing three times around our heads to fall on the floor in 
the initial of some friend ^s name. Here the apples were 
quartered and strung and hung in festoons to dry, all 
over the kitchen. 

There were the quilting bees for the girls about to 
marry, and spelling matches in which the parents took 
part. When we finished with the school speller, we tried 
to spell each other down wdth a dictionary. We had 
singing school once a week in winter, and several of us 
taught ourselves to play the accordion and fiddle, and 
dance the new steps of the waltz, polka and schottish. 

I must not forget our eagerness for trapping and hunt¬ 
ing, by means of which we learned much about the hab¬ 
its of crows, hawks, muskrats, woodchucks and even 







130 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


foxes, and which took ns over great spaces of the country. 

A boy of my age was not allowed to take part in a reg¬ 
ular squirrel hunt, when one had a dinner afterward and 
there was a prize for the hunter who could count the most 
tails, but we boys made collections. For whole seasons 
we gathered heads, legs, wings, and tails, as well as dif¬ 
ferent kinds of woods, leaves, flowers, stones, bugs, and 
butterflies. 

We liked to listen to the talk of the old ‘‘uncles’^ of the 
village, men who had few words, but were sharp and 
shrewd. Outside the general store, sitting on tool bench, 
wagon seat, chopping block or hog spout, they discussed 
crops, how to find a spring with a witch-hazel rod, the 
taxes, the preaching, and who would be the next con¬ 
stable. They were heroes, in a sense, having had their 
share in local events, but in weather signs and in old 
herbs and their uses the Indian knew more than the 
white man. 

The kitchen hearth and fireplace of these old times 
was the center of the family. On the swinging crane, 
hung from pothooks, chains and trammels, were all sorts 
of iron pots and brass kettles in front of a back log so 
big and long that it often had to be ‘‘snaked’’ in by a 
horse. 

Below, attached to the upright part of the andirons, 
was the turnspit-dog, revolved by hand, for fancy roasts. 
There were roasters and dripping pans, the three-legged 
spider in which bread was baked, first on the bottom and 
then tipped up to the coals. Here rye used to be roasted 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 131 

for coffee, which was later boiled in water and maple 
molasses. 

On the shelf above the fire stood the foot stove; a horn 
of long and another of short paper lamplighters; a saus¬ 
age staffer; tin lantern; flat irons; tinder-box; tankard; 
and coffee pots. High above all of these, perhaps on a 
beam, was a bayoneted flint gun or two with belt, bayo¬ 
net sheath, brush and primer. Overhead, on a pole, hung 
always a hat or cap on the end and perhaps a haunch of 
dried beef and a ham. 

Pumpkins were here, cut into long ringlets and dried; 
bundles of red peppers; braided seed corn and dried 
apples, the latter perhaps half covering the roof and 
south sides of the house. About the fireplace stood or 
hung the bed-warmer, the tongs, a dipper made of a hol¬ 
low gourd, candle-holders with long, thin reflectors, bel¬ 
lows, pewter porringers, a tin baker and steamer, and a 
toasting iron. 

Near by stood the cupboard displaying the best blue 
china and the rest of the pewter polished until it shone 
by scouring with wood ashes. And we boys tried to have 
a Jack-O-Lantern in the kitchen in November, with an 
expression, when it was lighted in the dark, as hideous as 
that of the head of an Indian Totem pole. 

The grandmother was both nurse and doctor, and we 
children had to gather for her, each year, a supply of 
herbs. Chief among these were pennyroyal, tansy, spear¬ 
mint, peppermint, catnip, thoroughwort, motherwort, 
burdock, dogweed, arnica, lobelia, larkspur, foxglove, 


132 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


fennel, sorrel, rne, saffron, flag, anise, witch-hazel and 
bloodroot. These plants and many more, each with its 
healing power, hnng in rows of dried bunches in the at¬ 
tic, and all grew in Ashfield. 

The old attic was a place of delight for children. Its 
floor might be covered a foot deep with corn on the ear, 
to be shelled winter evenings by scraping across the back 
of a knife driven in a board. The cobs were fed out to 
stock, or used for baking and smoking fires. 

In the attic were tins and boxes, and barrels of rye and 
barley and, later, oats, wheat and buckwheat. In one 
corner there might be a tub of frozen cider apple sauce, 
an old hat and wig block, a few woodchucks’ skins to be 
made into whip-lashes, a coon-skin for a cap. So, too, 
the farm cellar, shed, hog-house, barn, sheep and horse 
barn, sugar house, and corn-house, were stored with in¬ 
teresting objects for boys. 

Such week’s baking as the girls learned to help with! 
First, the rye and Indian bread was made up in a bread 
trough, put on the broad, meal-sprinkled peel, with hands 
dipped in water to avoid sticking, and then cleverly 
thrown in haycock and windrow shapes, perhaps on cab¬ 
bage leaves, onto the bottom of the great brick oven. 

When the bread was done the oven was still so hot that 
the pies could be baked and, last of all, a bushel of ap¬ 
ples was put in and the Saturday’s baking was done. 
Many could then tell of the time when, with pudding or 
mashed potatoes for a meal, no table was set, but each 
took a bowl of milk and helped himself from the kettle 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


133 


on the hearth. Or the family gathered about a well- 
scoured table, with no individual plates or butter knives, 
or waiting on each other; but each took a slice of bread 
and helped himself from the meat dish, or dipped the 
brown bread into the pork fat with forks. 

Wooden, pewter, then earthen plates, was the order. 
So, in the dairy, milk used to be set in wooden trays, then 
in thick, brown earthen bowls, before we had the milk- 
pans of today. A clam shell was our first cream skim¬ 
mer. Then followed a rough wooden skimmer. Churn¬ 
ing was done with a bowl and paddle, but at this time we 
had the dasher churn. Wooden stamps made such 
designs as an ear of corn or a flower on a pat of butter. 

All these home objects had stories, and grew from one 
simple form to something higher. The corn-sheller, the 
hen-coop, the plough, the modern sweeper, started from 
something made by hand. The first broom started as a 
bush and a bundle of twigs, or it was simply a birchen 
bough, its fibers stripped both up and down. 

We had many great days. There was the thrilling 
geese-picking, held twice a year; with the big apron, the 
big, vase-shaped goose basket, and the baby’s stocking 
drawn over the goose’s head to keep it from biting. 

There was the cheese-making, when the milk from 
three farms was gathered in a big tub, coagulated with 
a calf’s rennet; broken up into curds and whey with our 
fingers, scalded, chopped and salted, perhaps seasoned 
with sage; hooped; pared of those delicious curds; and 
daily greased all summer. 


134 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


There was the high festivity of road-breaking in the 
winter, when all the men and oxen in the neighborhood, 
often twenty yoke of oxen in one team, turned out after 
a long snow to cut the roads through to the store, the 
doctor, the postoffice, the church, and the school. 

Steers were sometimes broken in then, sandwiched be¬ 
tween the yokes of old cattle, often up to their backs in a 
drift and waiting, frightened and with lolling tongues, to 
be shoveled out. 

We had a chance to watch and learn trades when the 
open weather came. Within a boy’s range were our 
cooper’s shop; a gunsmith; a family who made baskets; 
turning shops where wooden spoons, bowls, pen handles 
and broom handles were made; a general tinker and 
solderer; besides carpenters, blacksmiths, and shoe and 
harness makers. Thus, in fine, there were many grades 
of progress and versatility. 

We farm children were, in a sense, members of the 
firm. Some such training the heroes of ’76 had. Such 
a people, digging stumps and stones, laying hundreds of 
miles of heavy stone wall and clearing timber, cannot be 
conquered. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


135 


When the Gingerbread Man 
Went to School 

Little Harriet Beecher, in the end of the family pew 
in the white meeting house of Litchfield, felt that every¬ 
one there must know what had happened. Dinah At¬ 
well, the village ‘‘witch,’’ an unfortunate creature whom 
kind Miss Pierce took care of, sat at the foot of the pul¬ 
pit steps and, from time to time, pointed one long finger 
in warning at Harriet. 

The hoys—mischievous Charlie, Edward who could 
scarcely he separated from his loved flute long enough to 
he led to church, Frederick and Henry Ward—were 
there in the Beecher pew with Harriet and their dear 
elder sister, Catherine, and they surmised that some¬ 
thing had happened to make Dinah single out their little 
Harriet for her Sunday attentions. 

Every Sunday Dinah, a menacing figure with her 
wrinkles, her grey hair, and her unkempt garments, sat 
at the foot of their father’s pulpit steps as a kind of self- 
appointed tithing-mistress to see that all the children in 
church were as quiet as so many mice. 

But the small Beecher boys and girls did not need to be 
told to sit still and listen while their dear father 
preached. Was he not also their best companion, since 
they had lost their mother when Harriet was only four 
years old, taking the boys for fishing trips and on nutting 
expeditions, planning’ picnics to the nearby hills and 


136 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


woods for finding the first wild flowers, and making even 
the home woodpile a place of magic? 

AVhen wood had to be chopped at the Beechers ^ the 
chips flew like magic, for the boys had a contest to see if 
they conld beat their father in chopping and splitting. 
Harriet put on one of her brother's small black jackets 
and chopped wood, too, pretending that she was a boy. 
And the day when her father had emptied all the home 
baskets, the stocking basket, the patch, the linen, the 
yarn, and the thread basket (to the distraction of their 
housekeeper) for a nutting expedition, Harriet had 
helped him fill the largest of all with butternuts for mo¬ 
lasses taffy. 

No, it could not be for any lack of attention to the ser¬ 
mon good Dr. Beecher was delivering, that Harriet was 
singled out by the tithing-mistress’ long, pointed finger. 

Harriet let her gaze wander to the pews occupied by 
the more grown-up girls in Miss Pierce’s pews. Miss 
Pierce kept the Litchfield boarding school for girls; in 
such good standing and repute throughout the country 
that girls came by stagecoach, by covered wagon, even on 
horseback over a hundred miles, from as far north as 
Vermont, to attend it. 

These girls wore their Sunday frocks of ruffled muslin, 
vari-colored silk capes and flowered chip hats, at which 
plain, rosy-cheeked Harriet could not help looking 
enviously. 

They were boarded about through the village. There 
were some of Miss Pierce’s girls who lived in the Beecher 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


137 



Pointed one long finger in warning 


house, for the salary of a Connecticut preacher at this 
time, the year 1820, was hardly enough to pay for the 
food of eight hearty, hungry country children such as the 
little Beechers. Louisa, one of Miss Piercers teen-age 
girls, lived at Harriet’s house. And as she saw Louisa’s 
downcast eyes, hardly raised above the opened pages of 
her psalter, Harriet began to realize what had happened. 

Catherine Beecher was a wonderful cook, although she 
was still only a girl. She could make gingerbread men, 
so crisp and toothsome that the younger children could 
hardly wait for them to be cool enough to eat; and so 




















138 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


realistic with their raisin eyes and buttons, their citron 
neckties and dough caps, that the children were, in spite 
of their appetites, loath to eat them. 

Yesterday, at the end of the family baking, Catherine 
had made a particularly large gingerbread man for 
Louisa. And not only had she set him in all his splendor 
on the mahogany bureau in Louisa’s room at the Beecher 
home, but she had written a poem about him and placed 
it, neatly copied on ruled foolscap, beside the gingerbread 
man. It read this wise: 

On a Little Gingerbread Man 
A happy school year to Louisa, my dear,^ 

And many a blessing her heart to cheer. 

As I very well know you have a live beau, 

I send you one that’s made of dough. 

You’ll like him much, as Bill says ‘‘by thunder!” 
For such a fine fellow is really a wonder. 

He’s a miracle, Louisa, without any doubt. 

And when his fine qualities you shall find out. 

Soon as modesty sweet will allow you to meet him. 
You’ll love him so dearly I fear you will eat him. 
Louisa, who had boarded with the Beechers the year 
before, had been delighted with the gingerbread man who 
brought good wishes to her at the beginning of the school 
year. But suppose that she had left his crumbs, or his 
poem, at school during the Saturday evening study hour 
when the girls were supposed to prepare themselves for 
Sunday! 

If this had happened, no wonder Dinah Atkins was 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


139 



She had written a poem about him 


pointing an accusing finger at Harriet Beecher. No one 
would ever think that quiet, motherly Catherine had 
written that poem. It was more like nine-year-old 
Harriet. 

Miss Piercers girls were not allowed to go to the eve¬ 
ning parties her school gave, and to which the boys from 
the Litchfield Academy were invited, until they were six¬ 
teen years old. Louisa was fifteen, but Harriet knew 
that the Academy boys smiled on winsome Louisa and 
carried her school bags from the Beecher gate to Miss 
Pierce’s dooryard in the morning. 






















140 BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 

Louisa, in her white fur cap and tippet, her black vel¬ 
vet jacket and bright plaid skirt, was a familiar picture 
skating in the winter with a gallant Academy boy to 
teach her how to cut figures on the ice. 

Gay, merry Louisa, never too busy to roll white cotton 
cloth into the most attractive little rag dolls with flannel 
shawls and yarn hair, for Harriet, and she was spilling 
tears upon her hymn book now! It couldn’t be allowed. 
Harriet sat up straight and looked in a determined way 
at Dinah Atkins. 

‘Ht isn’t necessary for you to point me out in meet¬ 
ing, ’ ’ she seemed to say. ‘ H ’ll carry other people’s trou¬ 
bles if it’s necessary.” 

There was an hour between meeting and dinner time 
and, instead of going home to sit and read the Bible in 
the parlor as the pleasant odor of the Sunday roast and 
vegetables came across the threshold of the kitchen to the 
children, Harriet started resolutely in the opposite direc¬ 
tion. 

She was proud of the beautiful village of Litchfield 
where she had been born, set like a white pearl in a cir¬ 
cle of emerald hills. It was early September, and the 
gardens in front of the dignified white houses on either 
side of the main street still flaunted colors like those of a 
Persian carpet in their gardens. 

They called the gardens dooryards, and the white 
front doors with polished brass knockers and fan-lights 
at the top opened right onto the pebbled paths between 
the beds of carefully tended flowers. Great flaming scar- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


141 


let peonies, stalks of crimson salvia, the zinnias of so 
many different colors, generous bunches of orange lilies 
with their faint, sweet perfume, all these caught the eyes 
of the hurrying little girl but she did not stop. 

On she hastened along the grassy street with its over¬ 
hanging, long-branching trees that formed a green roof 
for sheltering many song-birds in the summer; robin, 
oriole and bobolink. On she went, as far as the end of 
the street, where a large white house stood facing a dif¬ 
ferent kind of dooryard. This was Miss Piercers school, 
the most famous pioneer school for girls of our early 
history. 

Miss Pierce’s pupils themselves had planted and tend¬ 
ed the garden. Part of the teaching of the school, an 
innovation in those days, was study out-of-doors. Dressed 
in sensible boots and wool skirts. Miss Pierce’s girls 
walked for miles in all sorts of weather and they brought 
back roots and seeds, clippings and shoots for trans¬ 
planting in a garden of wild bloom such as had never 
before graced an American school. 

Standing, trembling a little, at the gate, Harriet 
Beecher saw Soloman’s Seal, the sweet white baneberry, 
trillium, violet plants, the pale anemone, the tall Jack- 
in-the-Pulpit and green maiden’s hait* fern. The cour¬ 
age of these wild flowers, growing in strange places, gave 
the little girl courage. She opened the gate, went up the 
well kept path to the door of the schoolroom, which was 
open, and entered. 

It was different from a schoolroom of today. The old 


142 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


diaries of the girls who went to Miss Piercers school 
tell ns about it. It measured about thirty feet by seventy 
feet, with a small clothespress at each end. One of these 
clothespresses held the girls’ bonnets and shawls and 
capes. 

The piano, made for Miss Pierce by Mr. George Astor, 
a brother of Mr. John Jacob Astor, was kept in the sec¬ 
ond clothespress. This was possible, because it was an 
odd kind of piano, built in two sections so that the upper 
part could be lifted from the four slender legs and these 
sections carried about easily. It could be brought out 
when the girls had their singing school or one of Miss 
Pierce’s plays in history was given, or there was a party 
in the schoolroom. And there were so few pianos in 
Litchfield that Miss Pierce’s instrument was often loaned 
to the neighbors. 

The plainest pine-wood desks and benches made of 
pine planks furnished the schoolroom, with the exception 
of a small table and an elevated chair for the teacher at 
one end. Beyond the schoolroom, Harriet could see Miss 
Pierce herself; small, cheerful, like a friendly New Eng¬ 
land wren if one could compare her to anything livelier 
than herself. She was seated in her rocking chair for a 
short moment alone, before dinner. 

The little girl bravely went into this sitting room, 
which was also a bedroom. It was a low-studded room, 
its floor covered with a neat red-and-green carpet and the 
fireplace filled with evergreen boughs behind its brightly 
polished andirons. There were small hanging book- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


143 


shelves, an old-fashioned mahogany hnreau, a cherry tea 
table, a gilt-framed mirror, and a bed turned np against 
the wall and covered with chintz. 

Piles of the maps the students had colored, their neat¬ 
ly written sheets of composition work, done on foolscap 
in fine copper-plate writing, and their geography and 
arithmetic papers, were waiting for Miss Piercers atten¬ 
tion. But there, on top of all, lay Catherine Beecher’s 
gingerbread man and the poem about him which she had 
'written for Louisa. 

Miss Pierce looked kindly over her eyeglasses at the 
little girl, standing speechless at first, looking at the 
gingerbread figure. One could see that Miss Pierce 
wanted to smile. Harriet took courage at that. 

^‘1 came to say that I am sorry,” she said. ‘H didn’t 
want Louisa to be punished for something that wasn’t 
her fault. It was only a 
joke!” 

The teacher rose and 
going forward put a kind 
hand on Harriet’s shoul¬ 
der. ‘‘Why did you come 
to me about Louisa*?” she 
asked. “We cannot allow 
frivolity during a study 
hour such as he,” she 
touched the innocent lit¬ 
tle gingerbread man lying 
before her “caused; but 



Harriet Beecher Stowe 


144 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


perhaps Louisa was not to blame. Did you write the 
verses, Harriet? We wondered if you did.’’ 

Harriet hesitated. She couldn’t have her kind sister, 
Catherine, blamed. Neither could she tell a lie. But 
Miss Pierce, who was a very wise teacher indeed, under¬ 
stood her hesitation. believe that you are trying to 
shield someone else, Harriet Beecher,” she said. ‘‘Well, 
never mind about it. Louisa will explain it all to me, and 
your kindness to her shall take away any penalty I might 
have imposed upon her because of her frivolity. Kun 
home to your dinner, child, and pay my respects to your 
father.” 

Who was she, this kind, small girl, who looked with 
longing at the pretty frocks and had envied the good 
times of the boarding-school girls of this pioneer school, 
and who was willing to sacrifice herself to save one of 
them unhappiness? Ah, you have guessed! This was 
Harriet Beecher who was later Harriet Beecher Stowe, 
the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

She was the little girl of the large, happy, making-the- 
best-of-things Beecher family, of old Litchfield in Con¬ 
necticut, and when she was only ten years old she was 
put in the Litchfield Academy where she won a prize at 
the end of the term for the learned composition she 
wrote on the subject, “Can the Immortality of the Soul 
be Proved by the Light of Nature?” 

But she had a very girlish desire for the life of a girls’ 
school such as the famous one kept by Miss Pierce, and 
the school register shows that Harriet had her wish 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


145 


realized when she was sixteen years old. We may see her 
enjoying the school sleigh rides, the husking bees, the 
trips for sugaring off to the nearby maple groves, the 
walks for studying wild flowers to Prospect Hill and to 
Echo Lake. 

In school, we may watch her embroidering a sampler 
or a piece of tapestry; illuminating letters of Bible 
texts; making records in geography and spelling and 
arithmetic; receiving, in her soft white muslin gown and 
ribbons, the twilled silk diploma which was given to each 
of Miss Pierce’s girls, fifteen hundred, all told, when they 
graduated from the school. 

But, more plainly, we see Harriet Beecher Stowe a 
little girl who had an unusually kind heart and was not 
»willing that anyone should suffer if she were able to bear 
the trouble on her own strong shoulders. 


146 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


In A Boy’s Town 

I do not mean to tell what this town in Southern Ohio 
in 1850 was, as men knew it, but only as it appeared to 
the boys. The civic center was the court-house, with the 
county building about it in the court-house yard; and the 
great thing in the court-house was the town clock. 

It was more important in the boys’ esteem than even 
the wooden woman, who had a sword in one hand and a 
pair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and 
the boys believed that she would be as high as a house if 
she stood on the ground. She was above the clock, which 
was so far up in the air, against the summer sky which 
was always blue, that it made your neck ache to look up 
at it. 

The bell was so large that once, when my boy was a 
very little fellow and was in the belfry with his brother 
to see if they could get some of the pigeons that nested 
there, and the clock began to strike, it almost smote him 
dead with the terror of its sound. He felt his heart 
quiver with the vibration of the air between the strokes. 
It seemed to him that he should never live to get down; 
and he never knew how he did get dovm. 

Besides his grandfather’s drug-and-book store, there 
was another drug store, and there were eight or ten dry- 
goods stores, where every spring the boys were taken to 
be fitted with new straw hats. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


147 


But the store that they knew best was a toy-store near 
the market-house, kept by a quaint old German, where 
they bought their marbles and tops and Jew’s-harps. 
The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and 
showed its timbers through the roughcast of its wall, 
which was sprinkled with broken glass that glistened in 
the sun. 

After a while the building disappeared like a scene 
shifted at the theater, and it was probably torn down. 
Then the boys found another toy store, but they con¬ 
sidered the dealer mean; he asked very high prices, and 
he said, when a boy hung back from buying a thing, that 
it was ^‘a very superior article.” The boys had that for 
a by-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper’s boy 
when they wanted to plague him. 

There were two bakeries. At the American bakery 
there were small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest 
cakes in the world, for a cent apiece; at the Dutch bakery 
there were pretzels, with salt and ashes sticking on them, 
that the Dut^h boys liked. The American boys m^de fun 
of the pretzels, and the bread at the Dutch bakery was 
always sour. 

There were two fire-engines in the Boy’s Town; but 
there seemed to be something always the matter with 
them, so that they would not work, if there was a fire. 
When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulled 
them up through the town to the Basin bank and piac- 
tised with them against the roofs and fronts of the pork- 
houses. It was almost as good as a muster to see the 


148 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


firemen in their red shirts and black trousers, dragging 
the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each 
side of the rope. 

My hoy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he 
never dared, and the foreman of the Neptune, which was 
the larger and feebler of the engines, was a figure of such 
worshipful splendor in the boy^s eyes that he felt that 
the foreman could not be just a common human being. 

He was a store-keeper, to begin with, and he was tall 
and slim, and his black trousers fitted him like a glove; 
he had a patent-leather helmet, and a brass speaking- 
trumpet, and he gave his orders through this. It did not 
make any ditference how close he was to his men, he 
shouted everything through the trumpet; and when they 
manned the brakes and began to pump, he roared at 
them, ‘^Down on her, down on her, boys!’^ so that you 
would have thought the Neptune could put out the world 
if it was burning up. Instead of that, there was usually 
a feeble splutter from the nozzle; and sometimes none 
at all, even if the hose did not break. It was fun to see 
the hose break. 

The Neptune was a favorite with the boys, though they 
believed that the Tremont could squirt farther, and they 
had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by 
its reticence in public. 

The Tremont was small and black, but the Neptune 
was large, and painted of a gray color lit up with gilding 
that sent the blood leaping through a boy’s veins. 

The boys knew the Neptune was out of order, but they 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


149 



The store they knew best was a toy-store kept by a quaint old German 
where they bought their marbles and tops 
and Jews-harps 













































150 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


were always expecting it would come right, and in the 
meantime they felt that it was an honor to the town, and 
they followed it as proudly back to the engine-house after 
one of its magnificent failures as if it had been a magnifi¬ 
cent success. The boys were always making magnificent 
failures themselves, and they could feel for the Neptune. 

Before the Hydraulic was opened, the pork-houses were 
the chief public attraction to the boys, and they haunted 
them, with a thrilling interest in the mysteries of pork¬ 
packing from which none of their sensibilities revolted. 

Afterwards, the cotton-mills, which were rather small 
brick factories, though they looked so large to the boys, 
eclipsed the pork-house in their regard. They were all 
wild to work in the mills at first, and they thought it a 
hardship that their fathers would not let them leave 
school and do it. 

Some few of the fellows that my boy knew did get to 
work in the mills; and, when one of them got part of his 
finger taken off in the machinery, it was thought a dis¬ 
tinction among the boys, something like ha’^^ng been in 
war. 

My boy’s brother was so crazy to try mill-life that he 
was allowed to do so for a few weeks; but a few Weeks 
were enough of it, and pretty soon the feeling about the 
mills all quieted down, and the boys contented themselves 
with their flumes and their wheel-pits, and the head gates 
that let the water in on the wheels. Sometimes you could 
find fish under the wheels- when the mills were not run¬ 
ning. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


151 


The mill-doors all had ‘‘No Admittance'^ painted on 
them; and the mere sight of the forbidding words.wonld 
have been enough to keep my boy away, for he had a 
great awe of any sort of authority. 

Besides the bridge, the schoolhouse, the court-house 
and jail, the pork-houses and the mills, there was only 
one other public edifice in their town that concerned the 
boys, or that they could use in accomplishing the objects 
of their life. 

This was the hall that was built while my boy could 
remember its rise, for public amusements. 

It was in this hall that he first saw a play, and then 
saw so many plays, for he went to the theater every 
night. But, for a long time, it seemed to be devoted to 
the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled 
in that science, which has reappeared in these days under 
the name of hypnotism, made a sojourn of some w^eeks in 
the town. Besides teaching it to classes of learners who 
wished to practise it, he gave nightly displays of its 
wonders. 

He mesmerized numbers of the boys, and made them 
do or think whatever he said. He wonld give a boy a 
cane, and then tell him it was a snake, and the boy wonld 
throw it away like lightning. He wonld get a lot of boys, 
and monnt them on chairs, and then tell them that they 
were at a horse-race, and the boys wonld gallop astride 
of their chairs ronnd and ronnd till he stopped them. 

Sometimes he wonld scare them almost to death with 
a thnnder-storm that he said was coming on; at other 


152 boys and girls OF PIONEER DAYS 

times he would make them go in swimming on the dusty 
floor, and they would swim all over it in their best 
clothes, and would think they were in the river. 

There were some people who did not believe in the pro¬ 
fessor, or the boys either. 

There were very few places of amusement or enter¬ 
tainment in the Boy’s Town that were within a boy’s 
reach; only one where he could get ice-cream, and the 
boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit this resort. 

But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the out¬ 
skirts of the town, which my boy remembered visiting 
when he was a very little fellow with his brother. There 
were two large old mulberry trees in this garden, and one 
bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries. 
When you had paid your money to come in, you could eat 
all the mulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a 
tame crow that my boy understood could talk if it liked, 
but it only ran after him and tried to bite his legs. 

Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, or puz¬ 
zle as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out 
among bushes; so that when you got inside you were 
lucky if you could find your way out. My boy, though 
he had hold of his brother’s hand, did not expect to get 
out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he had 
some notion that his end would be hastened by the tame 
crow. His first visit to the pleasure-garden was his last; 
and it passed so wholly out of his consciousness that he 
never knew what became of it any more than if it had 
been taken up into the clouds. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


153 


He tasted ice-cream there for the first time and had his 
doubts about it, though a glass full of it cost a fip, and it 
ought to have been good for such a sum as that. Later 
in life, he sometimes went to the place where it was sold 
in the town, bashfully gasped out a demand for a glass, 
and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. 

But the boys in that town, if they cared for such lux¬ 
uries, did not miss them much, and their lives were full 
of such vivid interests arising from the woods and wat¬ 
ers all about them that they did not need public amuse¬ 
ments other than those which chance and custom afforded 
them. 

They got pleasure out of the daily arrival of the packet 
in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust if I failed 
to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of the 
old-fashioned stagecoaches between the Boy’s Town and 
Cincinnati. I dare say it was of the size of the ordinary 
city omnibus, but it looked as large to the boys then as a 
Pullman car would look to a boy now. They assembled 
for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civic pride 
such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart. 

My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the 
stage when he was so young that it must have been when 
he first came to the Boy’s Town. The distance was twen¬ 
ty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It was this 
furious speed which gave the child his earliest illu¬ 
sion of trees and fences racing by while the stage seemed 
to stand still. 

Several times after that he made the journey with his 


154 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


father, seeming to have been gone a long age before he 
got back, and always so homesick that he never had any 
appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinner 
midway. When it started back, he thought it would 
never get off the city pavement and out from between 
its lines of houses into the free country. The boys 
always called Cincinnati ‘‘The City.’’ They supposed 
it was the only city in the world. 

Of course there was a whole state of things in the 
Boy’s Town that the boys never knew of, or only knew 
by mistaken rumors and distorted glimpses. They had 
little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religion, that 
was not wrong, and they concerned themselves with per¬ 
sons and places only to make use of them. 

But as they could make very little use of grown per¬ 
sons or public places, they kept away from them, and the 
Boy’s Town was, for the most part, an affair of water¬ 
courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the 
houses, and the alleys behind them. 

Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some 
of them had flower gardens that appeared princelier 
pleasances to my boy than he has ever seen since in 
Europe or America. Very likely they were not so vast 
or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of 
them, at least, had beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and 
borders of flags and pinks, with clumps of tiger-lilies and 
hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside it there were 
high bushes full of snowballs, and rosetrees with moss- 
roses on them. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


155 


In this superb domain there were two summer-houses 
and a shed where bee-hives stood. At the end of the 
garden was a bath-house, and you could have a shower 
bath, if you were of a mind to bring the water for it from 
the pump in the barn yard. This was all on a scale of 
unequalled magnificence, but many of the houses, which 
were mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum- 
trees and cherry-trees in it, and a vegetable garden at 
one side that the boy hated to weed. 

My boy’s grandfather had a large and beautiful gar¬ 
den, with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old 
gentleman trimmed and cared for himself. They were 
delicious 
grapes; and 
there were 
black currants, 
which the 
gr andfather 
liked, because 
he had liked 
them when he 
was a boy him¬ 
self in the old 
country, but 
which no Boy’s 
Town boy 
could have 
been been in¬ 
duced to take. 



^veTy house hod o wood-shed 





































156 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


Another boy had a father who had a greenhouse. He 
was a boy that would let you pull pie-plant in the gar¬ 
den, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in 
the greenhouse. His cleverness was rewarded when his 
father was elected governor of the state; and what made 
it so splendid was that his father was a Whig. 

Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, 
had a wood-shed, which was the place where a boy mostly 
received his friends, and made his kites and wagons, and 
laid his plots and plans for all the failures of his life. 

The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went 
in to ask his mother whether he might do this or that, or 
go somewhere. A boy always wanted to have a stove in 
the woodshed and fit it up for himself, but his mother 
would not let him, because he would have been certain to 
set the house on fire. 

Each fellow knew the inside of his own house toler¬ 
ably well, but seldom the inside of another fellow’s 
house, and he knew the backyard better than the front 
yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it was 
to wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the 
garret with him by the kitchen-stairs. 

If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance, found 
himself in the living-rooms, or parlor, he was very un¬ 
happy and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were 
not of an oppressive grandeur, and one was much like 
another. 

The parlor had what was called a flowered-carpet or 
gay pattern of ingrain on its floor. The other rooms had 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


157 


rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for 
the work, and dyed at home with such native tints as 
butternut, and foreign colors as logwood. 

The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood 
was burned and coal was never seen. They were lit at 
night with tallow-candles, which were mostly made by 
the housewife herself, or by lard-oil glass lamps. In 
the winter the oil got so stiff with the cold that it had to 
be thawed out at the fire before the lamp would burn. 

There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; 
and the fire on the hearth was kept from day to day all 
winter long, by covering a log at night with ashes; in 
the morning it would be a bed of coals. There were no 
fires in bedrooms, or at least not in the boy^s bedroom, 
and sometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher be¬ 
fore he could wash; it did not take him very long to dress. 

I have said that they burned wood for heating in the 
Boy^s Town; but my boy could remember one winter 
when they burned ears of corn in the printing office 
stove because it was cheaper. I believe they still some¬ 
times burn corn in the West, when they are too far from 
a market to sell it at a paying price; but it always seems 
a sin and a shame that, in a state pretending to be civi¬ 
lized, food should ever be destroyed when so many are 
hungry. When one hears of such things one would al¬ 
most think that boys could make a better state than this 
of the men. 


158 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The Boy Who Looked South 

The boy lived on a small farm in Alabama. It mat¬ 
tered not at all that his home was a rather rough cabin, 
its wall chinks filled in with clay, and its one door open 
the greater part of the year to the sun and the song of 
the mocking birds. 

Our South at this time, when it was known as King 
Cotton ^s land, was an outdoor place. A bit of land in the 
North was a field of stones and stubble, a patch of earth 
from which a living had to be w^rested as the farmer 
fought rocks and stumps, weeds and pests. 

But the same bit of ground in the southern states was 
black, rich loam, waiting for the seeds of the cotton plant 
and, with little tending, yielding sweet potatoes, green 
beans, peaches and berries. Three crops a year, of good 
vegetables, the boy’s father could raise with very little 
effort. 

So this boy, whose first name is lost to history, but 
whose last name was Murphy, had a good deal of time for 
play; for roaming the woods where great oak and long- 
leaf pine trees, hung with streamers of yellow jasmine 
and sprays of mistletoe, made a green, mysterious roof 
over his head. 

Every day of the year could be Christmas for him, be¬ 
cause tall holly trees bore crimson berries all the time. 
He could fish and row in a flatboat along some sunny 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


159 


creek, hunt ’possum with his father’s old flint-lock mus¬ 
ket and come home to a toothsome meal of hot cornbread, 
crisp from the coals of the hearth, bacon from their o^vn 
fat hogs, and yams as sweet as sugar. 

But once in a while this Murphy boy, in butternut jeans 
of his mother’s spinning and weaving and dyeing, had a 
trip in the family wagon with his father to Birmingham, 
the nearest town. The wagon was a shaky affair, drawn 
by mules and hardly able to hold its small store for trad¬ 
ing; a little fresh beef, a bale or two of cotton, some 
chickens and eggs for exchanging at the plantation town 
for a New England bonnet for the boy’s little sister, some 
New England shoes, a little coffee and a jug of molasses. 

The roads from the boy’s farm to Birmingham were 
about as precarious as was the wagon, made of logs at 
the best, and often only bridle paths through the woods 
and skirting the swamps. As they drove along a pretty 
girl on the white-pillared porch of some stately planta¬ 
tion mansion would smile at the picture he and the mules 
made. ‘'Piney-woods folk!” she would say to herself, 
running to the kitchen cabin back of the mansion to ask 
the cook to stop the warfarers for food and rest. 

''Hill-billy!” a town boy would call good-naturedly 
after the Murphy boy, but he was just as apt to share 
his supper with this boy from the hills. All the way this 
small farmer and his son found hospitality, and all the 
way they spoke with pride of the kingdom of cotton 
through which they were driving. 

"A plenty of railroads now!” the father boasted to 


160 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


the boy. ^‘There’s the Charleston and Angusta, one 
from Angusta to Atlanta and another from New Orleans 
to Memphis.’^ 

^^What^s the traffic likeT’ the boy asked, for his father 
had been to Atlanta once to visit their relatives, and the 
boy had not. 

‘^Your uncle was telling me,’’ his father said, ‘‘that 
there’s close to four hundred square miles of cotton be¬ 
ing grown in the South now, counting in the fields from' 
South Carolina to Texas. You ought to see the handling 
of the produce in a big town like Atlanta; wheat and 
corn, droves of hogs and cattle and mules, and tools and 
machinery from the North, being exchanged for cotton 
and sugar and coffee. The North has to make our bags, 
but we grow the cotton for filling them.” He flicked the 
mules with his whip, in pride, as he spoke. 

“The Gate City, they call Atlanta,” he went on. “If 
anything were to happen to it, the produce train system 
and the steamer trade would be all broken up. I’d like 
you to see a cotton wharf, sonny, piled so high you can 
scarcely see the water beyond the cotton bales, and above 
them the masts of the ships and the funnels of the river 
steamers! The South is a great place now! ’ ’ 

“And the North?” the boy wondered. 

“Well, as to that,” his father said reflectively, “I can’t 
rightly say from this distance. It’s got mills and men, 
but it’s a long way off, and different. Yes, that’s the 
way I feel about the North; it’s different.” 

It was on the tip of the boy’s tongue to ask how the 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 161 

North was different from the South, but they were near¬ 
ing one of the great plantations on their route and the 
interest of it made him forget everything else. 

The mules had turned into the brush at the side of the 
road to let the plantation coach pass. It was like the 
coach from a fairy-tale, if the boy had ever seen a picture 
book, which he hadn’t. Large and cumbersome and 
swung on great suspension springs, it was decorated with 
brightly painted designs of flowers. 

It was trimmed with brass, so well polished that the 
the hinges and knobs of the door glistened in the sun 
like yellow gold. The coat-of-arms of the plantation 
family was painted on the door, and a glimpse through 
the silk-curtained window showed the ruffled muslin, the 
silk cape and the flower-wreathed hat of a girl in her first 
teens, as the boy also was. 

The coach rolled between the holly hedge and the great 
cypress trees of the plantation drivewa^^ until it reached 
the wide portico of the white house. The farm team fol¬ 
lowed, for, the boy’s father said, the family might want 
to buy some of his eggs. There were marble statues on 
the lawn, a fountain tinkled, and the perfume of the 
Cherokee rose was heavily sweet. 

The plantation, set in the midst of its cotton acres, was 
a good-sized community with a settlement of cabins for 
the workers; a school; a chapel for them; huge barns, 
storehouses, and workshops, a granary, a smoke-house 
for curing bacon and ham. 

Dogs barked, and the workers were singing in the cabin 


162 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


quarter in tune to their tinkling banjoes, for the day 
was turning into the evening. There was a pleasant 
smell of baking bread and roasting-ears and yams. 

As it reached the portico of the many-roomed mansion, 
the light metal steps of the coach were lowered to allow 
the girl and her mother to alight. She waved her arm in 
its black lace mitt in a friendly way to the boy in his 
butternut jeans, motioning him to the cook-house where 
he and his father could find hospitality. 

They would have a good, hearty supper, a night under 
the stars as they pitched their tent in the shadow of the 
wagon, and after breakfast they ought to reach Birming¬ 
ham in a couple of hours. 

It had been a fine trip, the boy told his sister when, 
their trading successfully accomplished, they returned 
home. He had seen a good deal of the country and every¬ 
one had welcomed them, even if they were only ‘‘piney- 
woodsers. 

He had watched the cotton business as it was carried 
on at Birmingham, and he had come home with only one 
regret. The boy thought that he would like to have been 
able to go on to Atlanta and see the railroads center, as 
they did there. He wished, oh, how the boy wished, that 
he might sometime during his life have the great adven¬ 
ture of riding on a railroad train! 

This opportunity came to the boy late that summer, the 
summer of the year 1864. The North and the South were 
fighting; brother and fellow countryman was fighting 
brother and fellow countryman. Colonel Joseph Wheel- 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


163 



She waved her arm in its black lace mitt 


er, of the army of the Confederacy, whom all the Ala¬ 
bama ‘‘Hill-billys/’ like the boy, knew and loved, needed 
a color bearer for his regiment. The boy took the flag on 
its standard, the colors of the 19th Alabama infantry, 
and started for Atlanta, the Gate City of our South. 

He was not in uniform, for cloth was scarce, as rations 
were scarcer at this period of our National struggle. The 
old papers that tell us about this boy, whose name was 
Murphy, say that he went to the battle of Atlanta in his 
homespun suit. But all the way he bore the same cour- 
















































164 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


age and love for the South in his heart as his brother 
who came to the conflict from the North felt for the 
North. 

There were many boys with the army of the Con¬ 
federacy and with the army of the North; drummer boys, 
water boys, color bearers, stretcher bearers, telegram 
boys. Each loved his native earth, whether it was the 
black loam of a cotton field or the stone and stubble of 
a New England pasture. 

He was not able to go very far in the railroad train 
that would have looked odd to you to-day; its seats 
broken and without backs; its one small engine puffing 
with the effort of dragging it in jolts over the rough 
roadbed. 

The boys and girls of to-day, who have become so 
accustomed to the smooth, swift motion of present-day 
passenger trains, with their comfortable cushioned seats 
and modern conveniences, would have found the boy’s 
trip a great hardship. To him it was but a thrilling 
part of a great and long-desired adventure. 

When he reached the outskirts of the Gate City the 
rails were bent and twisted by the fires of burning wood 
spread and lighted on them. Many bridges were gone, 
too, and the v/agons had difficult work making their way 
through the swamps, often up to the hubs in mud. The 
boy had never seen anything in all his life like the 
strange wilderness of waterway and swamp through 
which, half drowning, half starved, he carried his flag. 

"What a startling contrast to the cotton fields, the 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 165 

sunny hillsides, and the pleasant pine and oak-filled 
woods of his own beloved ‘ ‘ piney-woods ’ ’ country, with 
here and there a lazy creek wending a quiet way through 
shady banks! 

Great avenues of trees stood in the shallow water 
among the curious wild plants and water lilies with stems 
like ropes and their leaves as broad as palm leaf fans. 
In the open spaces lotus plants, with umbrella-like leaves, 
floated about. 

It was lonely for a boy, traveling toward something he 
had never experienced, but this color bearer thought con¬ 
tinually of his father’s description of Atlanta. It would 
surely be like that, he hoped—railroads and traffic and 
excitement. 

And like many another of the weary, half-fed boy 
soldiers, the enticing visions that filled his mind of the 
wonders of the city toward which they were slowly trav¬ 
eling did much to help him to forget the privations of 
the long march; made him bear more sturdily the heavy 
flagstaff from which floated the regimental colors. 

Farther along, there were oaky woods for carrying his 
flag through. Wild azaleas grew here and magnolia trees 
and a jungle of shrubs and vines with the red berries of 
the holly for color, but the boy’s shoes had worn out by 
this time, and he felt the flagstaff very heavy on his right 
arm. 

‘‘Atlanta tomorrow!” came the cry to him in the fall 
of that year. It had taken the 19th Infantry of his state 
a long time to march to the point where it was needed 


166 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


and the color bearer was ragged and weak from lack of 
food when he heard the cry and was spurred on to finish 
the march. But he was disappointed in his first view of 
the city of his dreams. 

The Infantry crossed a stream by ferry, because the 
bridge was burned. Then they joined a long line of 
vehicles ahead; so crowded a line that the boy had plenty 
of time to look about. Thousands of tents were set 
around a bare field strewn with carcasses of animals and 
half burned household things. Many poor people were 
seeking on the ground for anything they could find to 
eat; bare grains even, which had been left in the wake 
of the armies. 

When they could find space to move, the boy and his 
fellow soldiers went on, but he did not know that he had 
reached Atlanta when they came to it. 

He struggled to a rise of ground overlooking the city 
and, forming there for marching down into action, they 
saw a column of black smoke rising toward the sky they 
could hardly make out for the blackness. Then another 
smoke column rose, and still another, until the city 
seemed shut away from him by these black pillars which 
all at once burst into crimson flames. 

The pillars of smoke became towers. The tongues of 
flame ran together into sheets of fire rising as far as the 
clouds. Southern pine burned quickly and with an intol¬ 
erable heat. The boy strained his eyes to see the Gate 
City, but he was almost blind from the smoke. When the 
order came to carry the colors toward this burning pit. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 167 

the boy stumbled and was scarcely able to hold the staff 
of his flag aloft. 

But, as the 19th Infantry of Alabama advanced, this 
Murphy boy, this piney-woods lad, who loved the South 
just as much as a Northern drummer boy loved the 
North, kept his eyes looking south. The cotton king¬ 
dom’s woods and wharfs and sea were in that direction, 
he knew. When a charge of powder shattered this boy’s 
right hand, in which he held erect the colors, he did not 
turn his eyes from the direction of the sun. It is written 
in an old paper that he shifted his flagstaff to the other 
hand, but he still looked unflinchingly south. 


168 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The Boy Who Knew Lincoln 

There are two 
kinds of stories 
that boys and 
girls like to read. 
One is a trick’’ 
story—^the story 
that isn’t true 
but which yon en¬ 
joy, because it 
makes you wait 
for what will happen next and keeps you wondering how 
it is coming out in the end. 

Then there is another kind of story that you read, not 
because it makes you wait, but because it makes you 
think. It is the true story, like this, which really hap¬ 
pened. There aren’t many good, true stories, particu¬ 
larly like this one about a telegraph boy. 

The telegraph was new, still wonderful, and our coun¬ 
try was in trouble, the time of this story being that of 
Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, so it was important that 
the wires should work well so as always to transfer their 
messages accurately and without delay. 

David Bates, not much more than a boy, had learned 
the telegraph system and was working in a railroad sta- 





BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


169 


tion as telegraph operator, when he heard the fifes and 
drums of the war call. 

His Sunday School teacher talked to the boys about 
patriotism that Sunday in April of 1861, and when there 
was a call for youths who understood the Morse code, 
at Washington, David started. His chief, Mr. Andy 
Carnegie, had recommended him for a position. Mr. 
Carnegie was a very young man, but he, too, was working 
for the railroad and wanted so much to help Mr. Lincoln. 

So David and three other telegraph operators started 
for Washington, and it was such a long trip and so mem¬ 
orable a one for them that they stopped on their way 
from Pennsylvania to have their pictures taken in Har¬ 
risburg. They wore long-tailed coats and very high-neck 
stocks, and David thought that perhaps he could send 
this ambrotype, as it was called, to the president some¬ 
time; he hardly dared hope that he ever would have the 
honor of meeting him. 

Excitement began when the boys reached Maryland. 
The railroad bridges over the Bush and Gunpowder 
rivers had been blown up by the Army of the Confed¬ 
eracy, so that the telegraph boys had to waste time going 
by water to Annapolis. There was a good deal to do 
there. The boys met Mr. Andy Carnegie and they helped 
repair the railroad and replace some telegraph wires 
that had been cut. 

Mr. Carnegie could do almost anything with steel. On 
the way to Washington he rode on the locomotive and, 
as they had almost reached the city, he saw that more of 


170 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


the telegraph wires were down. At one place they had 
been pinned to the ground between two poles by a band 
of raiders. 

Stopping the train, they all jumped off, Andy Carnegie 
first of course, and as he pulled the stake toward him 
with a mighty wrench to release the wires, the wires 
struck him in the face, knocking him down and cutting 
him. His face bled so that the company arrived looking 
like a hospital train at Washington, but no one cared. 
Here was the War Department, and David took off his 
coat and began the day-and-night telegraph work that 
helped to preserve the Union quite as much as did the 
fighting. 

Dark days those were! David had thought that his 
work was going to be all adventure, but it wasn’t. He 
had to send and receive messages until he was ready to 
drop at the signal board with weariness. A sergeant of 
the guard was stationed as sentry in front of the door 
leading to the telegraph room and no one, without a pass, 
was allowed to enter or leave. 

For his first four days, David was a prisoner there, 
his frugal meals being brought to him. He wanted to see 
the White House, to see the troops being mobilized at 
Washington, to see Abraham Lincoln. One day this tele¬ 
graph boy, David Bates, locked the door of the telegraph 
room and climbed out of the window. He came back by 
the same way that night, having looked about a bit, and 
was hardly seated at his board when he heard a knock 
at the door. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


171 



Boyhood of Lincoln 


David opened it, and a tall, awkward, homely man 
crossed the threshold and came in. The nights were still 
chilly and this man wore a gray plaid shawl thrown care¬ 
lessly over his shoulders. His face was lined with care, 
hut he smiled with a rare kindness on David as he hung 
the shawl and his tall hat on a hook on the wall and 
stretched his great length out in a chair. 

David gasped. He had heard of Old Abe, the rail 
splitter, uncouth and awkward, and this man seemed as 
homely as the description, but the man also had the bear¬ 
ing of the Great and the kindness of a father as he spoke 
to David: 









































172 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


‘‘The sentinel at the door had his orders to shoot any 
hoy who deserted the telegraph office/’ he said, in his 
slow, measured voice. “But you wouldn’t desert, would 
you, not if I was to stay here all night with you? We’ll 
try and keep awake together.” 

It was Abraham Lincoln, and after that, for four won¬ 
derful years David saw him in that little telegraph room 
ever so often and they spent a great many lonely nights 
together listening to the soft tick, tick of the instrument 
that brought its message of gun powder and blood, of 
defeat and victory. 

David forgot all about President Lincoln’s homely 
figure, the awkward gait that brought his tall, stooping 
figure across the grounds to the War Department, in 
company with some famous general in gold epaulets, 
sash and sword. All David thought of was how he had 
grown to love Mr. Lincoln and little Tad Lincoln, who 

used to upset the office 
by spilling ink and scat¬ 
tering papers, but with 
whom his father showed 
a never-failing patience. 

Pew telegraph oper¬ 
ators, before or since, 
have had such hard work 
and such important mat¬ 
ters to transcribe into 
. ^ , dots and dashes as Da- 

A sergeant of the guard was sta~ • j j. i i . 

Honed as sentry Via, together With hlS 
















BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


173 



A tall, homely man crossed the threshold and came in 



























































174 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 



lAncolrCs first home in Illinois 

helpers. The telegraph was so new, and so easily pnt 
out of order that it was a matter of life and death, he 
knew, to stick to his post and do his best. And Mr. 
Lincoln spent much time there with him; helping, em 
couraging, always brave and hopeful. 

Those were days of agony and danger for our country. 
President Lincoln’s hands and heart were full to over¬ 
flowing, but with the records of the struggle of the Union 
there remains for us Father Abraham’s constant thought 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


175 



Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois 

of young folks and of little children. The Washington 
Independent gave an account of a reception held at the 
WTiite House at this time: 

“Many persons,” the newspaper reported, “noticed 
three little girls, poorly dressed, the children of some 
mechanic or laborer, who had followed the visitors into 
the White House to gratify their curiosity. They passed 
around from room to room and were hastening through 





176 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


the reception room, with some fear, when the President 
called to them ‘Little girls, are you going to pass me 
without shaking hands P 

“Then he bent his tall, awkward form down—shook 
each little girl warmly by the hand. Everybody in the 
room was spellbound by the incident, so simple in itself.’’ 

The Blair boys at Silver Springs, a few miles north 
of Washington, knew President Lincoln. When he drove 
out to visit their grandfather, he was very apt to have 
a game of ball with the boys. There were eight or ten 
grandchildren on this farm of hundreds of acres, and it 
was good sport to play ball on the lawn. And President 


Lincoln joined ardently 
in the sport. How he ran 
with the children, how 
difficult it was to keep up 
with his long strides, 
how they tried to hit him 
with the ball and how his 
long coat tails stuck out 
as he ran! 



He was a kind man 
and particularly 
thoughtful of all boys. 
The telegraph operators 
there in the Washington 


Abraham Lincoln 


office knew him about as well as anyone, and they never 
forgot how he was always dropping in on them with 
messages for which they might just as easily have been 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


177 


sent. And there was one dispatch that they never forgot. 

The most important records of a period of history 
are to be found in its messages, and particularly in the 
files of a telegraph office. 

One day President Lin¬ 
coln came over in great 
haste and concern to the 
telegraph building, about 
a boy. Aunt Sally Banks ^ 

Johnny, who was going to 
be shot for desertion. Mr. 

Lincoln had found out 
how old, or rather how 
young, this soldier was. 

He sent this message 
trembling over the wires: 

don’t want anybody as 
young as eighteen shot.” 

Sometimes our new telegraph system did not work 
very well. Sometimes wire-tappers cut the wires. A 
New England boy of McClellan’s army was sentenced to 
death for sleeping at his sentry post and Mr. Lincoln 
wired to camp to have him pardoned, knowing himself 
how tired the boy must have been. 

He received no reply, so he wired again. Again, there 
was no answer, so the telegraph operators watched Mr. 
Lincoln, wrapped in his long cloak and muffier, start in 
his carriage on the drive to Virginia, where the camp 
was, to save the boy. And he did save him. 



178 boys and girls of pioneer days 

David Bates knew Willie Lincoln. He was only eleven 
years old when David became a telegraph operator in 
Washington and he died the next year. He had a pony 
that was kept, fat and lazy, in the White House stables 
after Willie was gone and Mr. Lincoln and little Tad 
took the best of care of it. 

‘‘Since Willie’s death,” Mr. Lincoln said at that time, 
“I catch myself every day talking to him as if he were 
with me. ’ ’ 

And the telegraph wires hummed with his love for all 
his family as David Bates sent and received messages. 

There was this one to Mrs. Lincoln: 

“Mrs. A. Lincoln, Manchester, Vermont: 

“All well, including Tad’s pony. 

“Tell dear Tad poor Nanny goat is lost. The day you 
left, Nanny was found resting herself and chewing her 
little cud in the middle of Tad’s bed, but now she is 
gone.” 

And David sent this message of safety to the mother 
of the little Lincoln when their father was in the midst 
of the hardest part of the war: 

“I think you had better put Tad’s pistol away. I had 
an ugly dream about him. 

A. Lincoln.” 

This faithful telegraph boy, David Bates, remembered 
just how Mr. Lincoln looked, up to the end of the 
struggle. 

“He would lean back in his chair in our office,” he 
said, “with his feet on a nearby table and his tired face 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


179 


looking out on the street that had seen so many brave 
soldiers march to the front never to return. Even we 
youngsters at the telegraph board could read the sorrow 
in his eyes. Then he would come back to us out of the 
clouds and cheer us with a story, or start toward the 
drawer where he kept the incoming dispatches filed. ’ ’ 

At last there came a day when Lincoln was absent 
from Washington, being at the front. The wires hummed 
as the message came: ‘‘Turn down for Eichmond. Do 
you get me wellT’ And the reply from David and his 
boys, “Yes. Go ahead.'’ The reply came from Lin¬ 
coln's headquarters at Eichmond, “We took Eichmond 
at 8:15 this morning!" So our Union was preserved. 

There are a great many stories about our martyred 
president, but this telegraph boy and his fellow-workers 
knew mainly his great patience, his honesty, and his love 
of his country, without which no one can accomplish 
mighty deeds. 


180 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


The Youngest Cowboy 

Our Union grew and, with its need for more room, new 
states were set apart and named. We went farther West 
through that vast, flat country of the United States which 
stretched for thousands of miles across the great river 
courses and as far as California. 

It was a place of white alkali plains, with no towns, 
and beyond these lay long mountain ranges running from 
north to south where the foot-hills stopped. There were 
no white men. The smoke and cinders of the steam 
engine seemed very far away on the trail which opened 
and widened itself from our borders at Mexico in the 
year 1845 and took its winding way for more than two 
thousand miles along the Eastern edge of the Eocky 
Mountains. 

Crossing Texas, curving over the Indians’ Bad Lands, 
through the states of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wy¬ 
oming and Montana, going East as far as Illinois and 
the growing town of Chicago, traces of this old path are 
still left. It was our longest trail of progress, for it was 
the cattle road. The hoofs of the steers and the ponies 
of the cowboys and herders marked a gallant highway 
as far as Canada from some Mexican ranch where the 
cattle started. 

Like so many of the events which make our nation 
great, the cattle trail had its impulse in the forces of the 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


181 


earth. The herds of Mexico were made ap of lean, mus¬ 
cular, active, fierce animals, who produced needed food 
and hides and leather, hut who never grew to the size of 
our stock of today because they grazed so poorly. A 
little grain, a little starved, dried grass, these were all 
the southern ranches could provide. But there was a 



difference in the soil and what it produced as soon as 
the cows were driven across the Rio Grande. 

Deep, green grass lands, fed by the mountain streams 
and cropped only by herds of buffalo, waited there beside 
the cattle trail. All a ranchman had to do, to turn his 
cow of the hot, low country from a creature of perhaps 
five hundred pounds to a sleek, fat one of a third more 
weight, was to drive her over the border and along the 
cattle trail. Buffalo grass, sun-cured short grass, the 
mesquite grass—all waited there lush and green. There 
was only one barrier to- this migration of herds which 
started at the close of our Civil War. As the trail wid¬ 
ened and deepened, it became red with human blood. 

The Sioux and Creek Indians, driven ever farther and 








182 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


farther West by the building of towns and the laying of 
railroad tracks, inhabited the West with a greater fierce¬ 
ness than would have been natural to them if they had 
not come to look upon the white man as a bitter enemy. 

And the different cattle trains of covered wagons, 
droves of lean, swift ponies, the cowboys always armed 
with pistols, and their droves of hundreds and thousands 
of valuable cows, waged warfare among themselves. 
They were many miles away from civilization, and the 
loneliness of the plains and the mountain passes turned 
them into monarchs of the road. 

To whichever drover was stronger belonged all the 
cattle he could collect along the trail, no matter who 
owned them. There was always the danger of a raiding 
party of the plains ’ Indians attacking the herd. 

Sometimes a herd of wild buffalo would rush madly 
into a moving cattle train, entangling their horns in the 
wagons, killing the cows and calves and often their 
drivers. 

Through drought and drifts, past Cold Springs where 
there was ice on the warmest summer day, climbing the 
Kocky Mountains, struggling through Salt Lake Valley, 
went the patient, big-eyed kine and their little ones, 
driven by the cowboy in his fringed leather and wide hat. 
If he killed to get a new herd, he also killed to protect 
his own cattle and was, in his turn, likely to leave his 
body beside the road. 

And about this time, in the year 1846, there was born 
a very famous little cowboy. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


183 


His name was Willie Cody. Being one of a large and 
pioneer family of Kansas, he had but a short time for 
schooling in the log schoolhouse which stood a mile from 
the Cody cabin. When he was eleven years old, this boy 
made up his mind that he ought to begin doing something 
to earn his living, so he left school and looked for a job. 

A company of drovers had formed in the little town 
that May, in the year 1857; Russell, Majors and Wadell. 
Their wagons and ponies were to take a herd of blooded 
stock as far as Salt Lake City, a long journey indeed, 
and it was a question if they would ever finish it. 

But as Willie Cody saw the cowboys coiling their 
lariats, tying on their gayly colored neck handkerchiefs, 
and swinging into the saddles of their wild little mus¬ 
tangs in front of the town store, he knew that he had 
found his work. He was going to be a cowboy, just as 
any boy of to-day would have wanted to be. 

Pirate, buccaneer, cowboy, soldier, hero—^what do the 
names matter? Each stands for the adventure every boy 
needs in his life, and every nation needs for its growth. 

But the cattle train was not so sure that it needed an 
eleven-year-old boy as much as the boy felt he was 
needed. Mr. Russell laughed at Willie, wearing his little 
coonskin cap although it was the spring of the year, his 
high, hide boots and his plaid homespun shirt. 

But the boy jumped astride a bucking pony and showed 
how he could stick to its back without a saddle. He told 
the drovers that a boy was always useful for bringing 
wood for a camp fire and scrubbing the bacon pan with 


184 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


sand after supper. Then, to further persuade the drov¬ 
ers, Willie showed them how well he could write, and how 
much in earnest he was. 

This is what Willie Cody wrote at home that night on 
a scrap of paper by the light of his mother’s kitchen 
candle: 

‘^William Cody’s Vow. 

William F. Cody, do hereby solemnly swear before 
the great and living God, that, during my engagement 
with and while I am in the employ of Eussell, Majors 
and Wadell, I will not, under any circumstances, use pro¬ 
fane language; that I will not quarrel or fight with any 
other employe of the firm; and that, in every respect, I 
will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, 
and shall direct all my acts so as to win the confidence 
of my employers. So help me God.” 

When the lad presented his credentials to the cattle 
men the next day, he was taken into their employ. He 
said good-bye to his mother, telling her he would come 
back after he had made his fortune. He started for the 
plains at the end of the line, his lariat rope swung over 
his shoulder and a pistol in his broad leather belt. 

The country was pleasant at first, being at the spring. 
The willows were softly green and the Kansas grass¬ 
lands bloomed with many small, bright wild flowers. 
Trout were running in the streams Willie Cody had to 
ford, and the thickets were alive with rustling grouse. 

He rode bravely with the other cowboys, doing his 
share in rounding up the gaunt mothers of the herd and 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


185 


the little calves that had begun to totter feebly beside 
them. Their trail went northwest through Kansas, cross¬ 
ing the Big Blue Eiver, then the Big and the Little 
Shandy Rivers, and arriving after a while in Nebraska. 

Here, after the spring had turned into a hot, breathless 
summer, and the fall was come upon them in an early 
frost and snowstorms, the way was hard for all. It was 
a particularly hard trail for a lad of eleven years. 

A herd of five hundred buffalo stampeded the Bussell 
cattle train, entangling themselves in the wagon chains 
and the wheel spokes, and killing a number of the cow¬ 
boys as they took their crazed way off dragging some 
wagons. 

Sometimes a ring of the great gray buffalo wolves 
would circle about a defenceless cow and her calf, play¬ 
ing and teasing them before killing the frightened pair. 
Coyotes sneaked down from the foothills and often Willie 
Cody, scouting for a spring, would come upon the long 
toe-marks of a prowling grizzly bear. He learned to 
shoot well that season; shoot to kill. 

Sometimes the herd, frightened by buffalo or when 
urged to ford a deep stream, would stampede. This 
might happen at night, and Willie would be awakened 
from his rolled blanket in the last wagon by a mighty 
roaring like all the thunder of all the storms he had ever 
known rolled into one great crash of sound. 

It would be the roar and flying hoof-beats of the cattle, 
as the frightened creatures crowded each other, suffo¬ 
cated the calves, gored their neighbors, and would have 


186 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


disappeared in the murk of a slough if the drovers had 
not saddled and ridden like the wind after them. Willie 
rode, too, his tough little pony braving death each mo¬ 
ment as he circled the mass of tangled hoofs and horns, 
swinging his lariat and shooting off his gun in the air to 
help with the round-up. 

Or the herd might lose itself in a snowstorm when the 
snow drifted. This was a test of a cowboy’s skill and 
courage, for he had to ride in the face of blinding sleet, 
the wind cutting his face with sword thrusts, not able to 
see his way among the shifting, solid ranks of the steers. 

Willie Cody learned to bear such cold that season as 
he had never before known. He learned to follow the 
cattle when a moment’s rest would have meant that he 
would go to sleep in the silent dreaming of the frost. 
But he rode with the herd whose stiff legs wavered, 
whose mouths were shut with the ice, and their eye 
balls glazed over; rode until he was able to gather in 
some lost cow and her calf. 

So the train moved gallantly on, making history as it 
went, for where the long trail of the cattle took its way 
cities were to rise. Fertile meadows and orchards whose 
trees would be loaded with fruit, great ranches and grain 
lands, and the tall chimneys of factories, would appear 
where now there were only hoof prints. 

Riding near the end of the train went this little lad, 
Willie Cody, often tired enough to give up his adventure 
and often wanting his mother, but never losing heart. 

They were in the Bad Lands when the Russell outfit 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


187 



saw, on the edge of the plain, a long line of flying color. 
It looked as if a flock of gaily plumaged birds had mi¬ 
grated from the Tropics and was winging toward them. 
But when the train with its reddish, slow-moving crea¬ 
tures, its torn and dusty wagon coverings, and its 
ragged crew of drovers, came closer to the horizon line, 

they saw what the color meant. 

Sioux Indians riding toward them in their war paint 
















188 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


and feathers, outnumbering the white men ten to one! 

There was no help for the train anywhere. There was 
not a human being for hundreds of miles except the 
approaching savages and the small company of the 
cowboys. Arrows stung the air and the six-shooters 
cracked it. 

Willie Cody shot, too, riding ahead with his company, 
but they knew in a very short time that there was^ nothing 
to do but give up. It was possible that the Sioux war¬ 
riors would be satisfied with the wagons and their con¬ 
tents ; knives, cooking utensils, some bright handkerchiefs 
and the like. So the herd was driven toward a river and 
the men, leaving most of the horses with the wagons to 
the savages, walked behind the lowing cows and bleating 
calves. 

Willie walked near the end of the line, for his legs were 
not long enough to allow him to keep up. One of the 
cowboys who remembered about it, said that the boy was 
as much as a hundred yards behind and closer to the 
band of marauding savages than the others. They had 
almost forgotten the little lad in their last effort to get 
the cattle into the water where there might be a chance 
of fording and saving them. 

The path was deep with mud and the going so slow 
that, when they reached the bank of the river, it was 
almost dark. Once there, they had to build and float 
rafts and wade out into the water, trying to keep the 
cattle together. When the water was too deep for wad¬ 
ing, they clung to the edges of the rafts. 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


189 


The youngest cowboy caught up with them toward ten 
o^clock that night and plunged bravely out into the 
water. 

It was soon above his depth, but he, too, clung 
to the raft, always looking back toward the shore. The 
drovers were too busy with the cattle to keep a very close 
watch on the river bank and they felt quite sure that the 
danger was over. They thought the Indians would de¬ 
part after having plundered and burned the wagons. 
Willie Cody was not so sure of this. 

The moon rose and by its light he was able to see 
farther. The black bank rose high above his head, and 
over its top Willie saw a flash of crimson. He had laid 
his gun for safety and dryness on the edge of the raft. 

Still clinging with one hand to the raft, he fired now at 
that crimson target. He shot straight. The Sioux scout, 
whose head feather the boy had seen, would never attack 
a cattle train again, and the youngest cowboy had saved 
his outfit. That shot from the water surprised and 
frightened the band of Siouxs into flight. 

One of the first newspaper reporters of our country, 
riding into Salt Lake City on his pony, interviewed 
Willie Cody when the small, poor train of so many losses 
reached that town. He was a good deal of a hero, having 
protected his company so well. He was also a real boy, 
and enjoyed being famous at thirteen. 

And when the old days of trailing passed, and the 
West became settled and prosperous through the courage 
of the cowboys and the wagon drivers and the herders, 


190 


BOYS AND GIRLS OF PIONEER DAYS 


William Cody, Buffalo Bill, came East to tell the boys 
and girls about the adventure of it all. 

He brought the West to us; Indians, rough-riders, 
cowboys, and the fleet horses from the plains. He showed 
children how to ride to victory, as the cowboys of our 
history rode, building the nation’s prosperity as they 
followed the Long Trail with the herds. 


Fairy Tales of Long Ago 

By Julia Darrow Cowles 

Grades 3-4 Cloth Binding 

128 Pages Colored Illustrations 

Price, 68 Cents a Copy, Postpaid 

T rain a child’s ima^nation by feeding it with the fancies of 
great story-tellers, is a truism familiar to all teachers. There 
is nothing like the old fairy tales for nourishing young imagi¬ 
nations. This group of tales Mrs. Cowles has gathered from 
many sources and retold in charming fashion. That they have 
gained, rather than lost, by the retelling, will soon become ap¬ 
parent to teachers; for only the simplest words and phrases are 
used, and the narrative is so handled as to emphasize the home¬ 
ly lesson in manners or morals concealed in the story. 

These tales are full of action and delicious nonsense which 
accord with the child’s mode of living and thinking. Besides 
teaching the children to read, and furnishing them with much 
fine entertainment, these stories inculcate lessons in good- 
fellowship, usefulness, politeness, and agreeable 
wholesome living. 

The volume comprises fifteen stories, five of 
which are dramatized for schoolroom use. 

CONTENTS 

The Nightingale 
The Six SwaM 
Bruno’s Picnic 
Ole Shut-Eyes 
Inger’s Loaf 

Southwest Wind Esquire 
The Three Lemons 
The Twelve Months 
A Mad Tea Party 
The Enchanted Mead 
The White Cat 
The Ugly Duckling 
The Miller’s Daughter 
i^ofessor Frog’s Lecture 
The Spring in the Valley 

A. FLANAGAN COMPANY—CHICAGO 











The Children of 
Mother Goose 

By JULIA DARROW COWLES 

Price, 68 Cents a Copy, Postpaid 


For Grades 
Two and Three 

Illustrations 
in Colors 

128 Pages 
Cloth Binding 


SUB CiUU>ii£N OF dOTUEB OOOaB 


TV yrANY a young reader longs to know more 
about his favorite characters in Mother 
Goose—more than the short rhyme about each 
is able to tell him. In this collection of minia¬ 
ture stories, he has his wish gratified. Here 
he gets intimate glimpses of the home and 
community life of many old friends: Mistress 
Mary, Boy Blue, Peter Piper, Curly Locks, 
Crosspatch, Simple Simon, Jack and Jill, Tom¬ 
my Tinker, Bobby Shaftoe, and a host of 
others. 

It appears that the Mother Goose children 
are a healthy, fun-loving, workaday lot of 
youngsters, exactly like the boys and girls who 
read about them. They attend Dame Trot’s 
school. They give tea parties and Valentine 
parties. They take care of the babies of the 
Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe. They help 
the Crooked Man build himself a new chim¬ 
ney. Dr. Foster takes them walking in the 
woods and teaches them things about insects 
and spiders which every child is simply aching 
to know. Mother Goose herself presides de- 
Specimen Page lightfully over their revels. 

Teachers will find these stories valuable for inculcating a love of reading in 
the child; first, because they are intrinsically fascinating, and second, because 
they quicken his mental powers by a shrewd application of some lesson in 
daily living. 

A. FLANAGAN COMPANY—CHICAGO 



wofMr which goo$4 gave ii 

“Oh, Mother Goose," they all cried, “your 
goose has laid a golden eggl” 

“Why, sure enough,” said Mother Goose 
“That must be my Barter present. I wonder 
which goose gare it to met” 

Then Simple Simon waved bis band just 
as though he were in school, and said, “It 
was Jack-A-Dandy. I saw him put it in the 
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